Things Are Tougher Than We Are
by callmesandy
Summary: Sequel to A Thousand Whys. Marty Deeks comes home and rebuilds his life after one heck of a crappy year. Warnings for: domestic violence, torture, psychological trauma, chapter 7 references a child death in the course of the case.
1. Chapter 1

Notes: Not mine, no profit garnered. Spoilers for Bourne Supremacy. Sequel to A Thousand Whys. Goes AU after NCISLA s3, and NCIS s9. For this story, Sam is not married to Michelle, ex-CIA agent, but a woman named Roxana, nickname Ro. The Sinclair project with the Russian sleeper agents and the nuclear bombs did happen here and NCIS was part of the investigation but not the way as on the show. Characters from NCIS: RED and NCIS appear. Title & quotes from the National "Heavenfaced."

* * *

_No one's careful all the time,  
If you lose me, I'm gonna die._

"Oh, man, I hate this part," Marty said.

"It was inevitable," Hetty said. "Do you really think he'd get a happy ending?"

"Hetty," Marty said. "You gotta believe in happy endings. I know it's just a movie, but come on." It was his third night in the hospital. Getting shot was starting to hurt slightly less and the anticipation of Sam's idea of training in tradecraft was growing leaps and bounds. Like jumping over buildings or over planets kind of leaps and bounds. Still, tonight he had Jello and Hetty, watching Bourne Supremacy with him.

Hetty had come every night. He wondered if it was some sort of next of kin bonding. He'd take Hetty over anyone he was actually related to so he was totally fine with it. "I wish they had subtitles for the Russian," he said. "And the German and the French." He looked winsomely at Hetty. She smiled at him like she saw through his bullshit but she obliged. It was her default expression and why he loved her.

"Thank you," he said. Hetty not only translated, she pointed out the mistakes the actors made.

"He and Marie could have made it if not for the bad guys," Marty said.

"There are always bad guys," Hetty said. "And most of them think they're patriots."

"But love can survive," he said.

She was silent for a moment. "Possibly," she said. "I hope so."

"Are we getting dramatic? Or deep? I'm kinda opposed to that," Marty said.

"Are you? You started it, Detective." She smiled at him.

They talked about the movie. He wondered if she knew he'd slept with Kensi the one time. It was Hetty, of course she did. She'd never say anything.

"Which is when she told me about the guy," Marty says.

Sam says, "Did she call him the guy?"

"You know what? At first she did not mention his name. She was talking about truly evil people she had known -"

"Yeah, Hetty's probably got a really long list," Sam says.

"She talked about this one in particular, a CIA agent she'd known. When the Iron Curtain went down, he was personally disillusioned by it. He felt his job had been meaningless. Hetty said it very contemptuously," he says. "So this guy joined with some other assholes and started a shadow group with other CIA agents, MI-6, they were going to make money, destabilize the world, fuck boundaries, no loyalty. That was their big plan."

"You are not being very precise," Sam says.

"You are a hallucination," Marty says.

Sam huffs. "I am not."

"They had this plan. They invited Hetty to participate. She said yes. But she meant no, because she was a spy. Am I being precise enough for you?"

"Yes, thank you," Sam says. "Please continue."

"Of course Hetty took them down and one of them vowed to get her and her little dog, too. If Hetty had a little dog. Maybe she did." Sam looks bored. "His name is Nigel Tuffnell -"

"That's the guy from Spinal Tap."

"Yes, it is. Also, you are so a hallucination. No way Sam Hanna knows characters from Spinal Tap off the top of his head. Let's remember I've been physically and psychologically tortured for over a year, with an emphasis on psychological. His first name is Nigel. He liked to, he had this big personal vendetta against Hetty. He kidnapped three agents she was mentoring back in the 90s and very early outghies. He had this theory about training agents. Torture, physical, psychological, break them down to pieces so they're nothing and then rebuild as super crazy murderous motherfuckers."

"Which you think he did to you."

"I know he did to me. I saw him. I met him." Marty closes his eyes. "He asked me questions once. In the beginning. All about the family. He really wanted to know about my mom. To make me feel bad, I guess."

"Maybe it was something else," Sam says. "You know there's something wrong."

"You're a hallucination," he says.

"No, I'm not," Sam says. He leans in, looming over Marty. "I'm a dream, this is a dream and you need to wake up right now."

Marty rolls to the side, knife in hand and up as he opens his eyes. It's another homeless person slipping into his space. A high voice says "okay okay" and the person backs up at the sight of his knife.

Marty sits up and does his morning assessment. Still hungry, still slightly feverish and the smell and appearance of the two infected wounds on his calf look worse and worse. Everything else is the same, broken or scarred like it's been for the last two months. Nothing's incapacitating yet and he can still run, so that's a problem for the future.

It went like this: the physical torture first. Solitary confinement. Waterboarding. The usual experimental dentistry. Bones broken, not reset properly. No fun. Then he woke up in a mental hospital. A perfectly nice institution where he was told he was locked up for his own good. See, he had this delusion he was a lawyer, cop, spy named Marty Deeks. He wasn't. He was someone else who never graduated high school, who couldn't even surf. It made sense someone like that would want to be someone else. Marty wonders if the nice doctors and nurses even knew it was all a lie. He did actually graduate high school, college, law school, NCIS training classes like Sniper Urban Hostage Taking. Not that he didn't have his doubts some days. Then it was back to the physical torture where they all called him Martin. No one called him Martin. He didn't correct them.

The next time he was in a halfway house. He had a cousin visiting him all the time to tell him he was a loser. He could never be that person he was convinced he was. The cousin made sure he took his meds. One day Marty went out and took a bus at random, then another bus, then another. He walked one way then the other. He was in a real city, and they couldn't control all the internet ever. He googled himself and found his memorial page. He sent his letter to Kensi the next day.

Men in suits brought him to his "cousin's" apartment a week after his trip and shot his "cousin" in front of him.

They didn't go back to physical torture this time. They just imprisoned him in one of their training facilities.

Nigel himself came to the training facility. He had pictures of Kensi laughing, looking over her shoulder, her hair long and thick. She was definitely have a few great hair days in those pictures. She was standing with some guy who had Wall Street frat boy grown up hair and a nice suit. The guy looked at Kensi like she was the sun and moon. Which, Marty can admit, is how everyone should look at Kensi. "This," Nigel said, "is what your wife is doing now."

Marty moved the pics on the table. They were all cropped close, he couldn't see her body or his. Just shoulders and hair. "My widow. She thinks she's a widow. She should be happy. I'm glad she's happy."

He wondered if Kensi had gotten the letter when the pics were taken. Or if she'd gotten it later. Or if it had gone to the wrong address. Maybe he'd remembered wrong. He had every excuse for remembering wrong but he was sure he hadn't.

"Are you really happy?" Now that he thought about, it wasn't Nigel that time. Or there was another man who had the same pictures. He knew he was questioned more than once, taunted with the same damn pics. It was always nice to see Kensi.

"I am really happy for her. I mean, it kinda sucks. It's gonna throw a little wrench in my whole getting the fuck out of here and going home plan, but hey, I charmed her once. All the way into marrying me. I bet I can do it again."

"Do you think you're funny?"

"Yes, yes, I do. Why do people ask that question? Of course I think I'm funny. I'm making jokes and I don't think they're bad jokes."

He escaped two days later. He thinks he only killed three people.

He has a plan. He escaped with a plan and he is going to keep to his plan. He can't contact Kensi until he can do it in person. He doesn't believe any of the pictures Nigel and/or the other man showed him, but if Kensi has indeed moved on and found someone else that just means she didn't get his letter. Or by the time she got it, she found someone. Which is fine, because she thought he was dead. She should be happy. Once he gets back to her, they will work everything out.

But there's people watching her so he can't call her because they would know. Hopefully she's looking for him, stealthily, but if she's not, then she's safe. So he will get to California and back to LA and find her. Or whomever is still there. Then someone else can take over.

The merry band of Nigel not Tuffnell is after him, too. They're more up-to- date on Marty's current appearance. They're also very unhappy with him for escaping. Stealth, he thinks. Everything is stealth. He is stealth. Stealth is he. He blinks at his own thoughts, going in circles again.

The sun is coming up so he vacates his deserted house. He easily finds a line of his fellow travelers so at least he knows where today's breakfast is coming from. It's pretty good food, too. Even better, there's an older fellow offering barber services. He smiles as he sits down in the chair. "I can use some cleaning up," he says. Sometimes he does an accent for fun, but he's past that kind of work now. As long as he stays unmemorable, he thinks he's okay.

He's spent two months running. He's off the grid with his lack of ID, his shit appearance and his general slightly crazy demeanor. But he's made it this far, wherever he is.

The barber is a really nice guy, like most of the people he's met in the last two months who take time to help the homeless. At Marty's request he gives him a nice close shave. The barber manages to avoid nicking the scars Marty's acquired.

"Buzzcut," Marty says. "Like the good old days." When he worked with someone who had a buzzcut, he adds in his head. He hates pretending to be military.

"You look good," the barber said.

"You're a liar, but thank you," he says.

The barber asks for one favor. He says he asks everyone whose hair he cuts. "If you ever meet a man named Peter Carlson, with brown eyes, 6 feet tall, you tell him he come home anytime he wants."

Marty promises.


	2. Chapter 2

_Hit the ceiling, then you fall,  
Things are tougher than we are._

Kensi despises her breast pump. She can make it work, and she will not give up on this. It's loud and uncomfortable. Prairie opens and closes her mouth, lying on the couch, watching Mommy. "This is what we do when we go back to work," Kensi says.

She has a new apartment. It's more secure than her last one, than the place she shared with Marty. She sniffles and winces at the same time. She brought out some of their furniture, bought a few new things, brought a little from DC. It doesn't really look like her place yet. Monty lounges on his dog bed from DC. Abby made it for him and he won't sleep anywhere else. She wonders if McGee knows he's missing three sweatshirts.

Once she's pumped and put the milk away, she picks up Prairie. Her baby bug drools but definitely smiles at her. Prairie squirms and smells like heaven. Then she smells like vile vile baby poo.

After ten weeks back in California, Kensi has officially passed all her field tests. She is ready to be an active field agent. She can still shoot like she was born with a rifle in her hand. She smiles down at Prairie on the changing table. "Your grandpa was a sniper. We have some impressive skills on Mommy's side of the family."

At 8 am in the morning, she starts the adventure of wrangling Prairie into her car seat. Sam had a car seat expert come over and make sure hers was properly installed. She imagined Marty saying he would be excellent at that job and he should have that job. She could hear his voice shaping the words. "Hot moms, adorable babies, safety first. I could do it. I would excel."

It isn't hard to pretend to still be in mourning. Monty is in the back already, silent and waiting for his stop at doggy daycare.

Prairie is not a big fan of the car seat. She makes petulant noises and by the time they get to the mission, she is about to enter full meltdown. Kensi is the miserable failure of a mother standing in the parking lot, feeding her baby to just get her to stop crying.

Callen comes out of the Mission towards her. She totally forgot about all the cameras, so everyone got a Kensi breast show. Awesome, she thinks. Just when she was getting used to her boobs being seen by everyone, she gets a new workplace and new people to gawk.

Callen says, "How's Prairie?"

"How do you think?" Kensi presses her lips together. Prairie is now just whimpering intermittently. Kensi sniffles again and puts her boob away one-handed. She has some new skills, at least.

She says, "Maybe I can't do this," and feels like shit.

Callen takes Prairie from her and the brat instantly calms down. Kensi tells herself to shut up. Prairie is a not a brat, she's 24 weeks old and she still figuring out the world and she doesn't have a dad. Callen says, "If anyone can handle this, it's you, Kensi. You want to do this, right?"

She straightens up. "I do," she says.

Hetty for some mysterious reason decided 5 months ago that the Mission should have a daycare. Callen still has Prairie so Kensi follows him. "All the people working here are former agents, vetted record from here to back." Callen looks back at Kensi, and says, "Sam is willing to have his kids here."

"I'm good," Kensi says. She is good with Hetty's machinations. She just isn't ready, she thinks, to leave Prairie. To not have her little bug with her every single second. Though going to the bathroom is about to get a lot easier.

Prairie mewls and Callen hands her back to Kensi. "Calmed down a little, Bug?" Prairie curls closer to Kensi.

"She has a lot of hair for a baby," Callen says.

"Is Sam envious?" Kensi grins.

Callen laughs. "He just might be. But I didn't think babies had that much hair."

"Some do, some don't," Kensi says. "I think we both know where she got it from."

Kensi somehow puts Prairie in the hands of the slightly scary women working at the daycare. She drops off her pumped milk. She walks out quickly and rubs at her eyes until she stops crying. "Remember when I barely cried?"

Callen stops and looks right at her. "It doesn't make you weak, Kensi."

"You are being too nice to me," she says. "Is it because you have a girlfriend?"

He turns away and laughs. "Who said that?"

"Everyone," Kensi says. "Sam was practically hiring skywriters when you spent two weekends away with her."

"She was working, I helped her out."

Kensi laughs. She straightens her shirt and tries to look non-sobby new mom. This is the way it was supposed to be, mostly. Marty was a little drunk and he told her, "I'll be the house husband. You make all the babies, then save the planet while I make our nest." She can almost smell his breath, his musk again. "Caw, caw," he said. "That's me, making our nest for our 15 tiny warriors for good."

She relaxes her shoulders down her back. "So you don't have a girlfriend? Nothing going on with, uh, London?"

"Paris," Callen says. "Girlfriend sounds like we're 10 year olds."

"It really doesn't," she says. "Should I say sexual partner?"

"Maybe you should say anything except for that," he says. "Hey, look, here we are."

The part of the Mission where the agents sat had been redone. She couldn't figure out where she and Marty had sat, which desk had had the box where he kept his wedding ring. She likes it, she thinks. There are three desks at an angle facing two desks. Kensi walks to the empty desk, the middle of the three. Sam to one side, Callen and the new agent across from her. "Who uses this one?" She points at the third desk, next to hers.

"Eric and Kai when they're down here. Nell when she gets back."

"How long will Nell be with the Red team?"

"It's actually the Green team," Callen says. "She wants to try being more out in the field, we'd be idiots to stop her." He doesn't actually look that happy about it.

"And we get a boy to replace her," Kensi says.

"But your new partner is a girl, does that make it all balanced?" Callen waves over a tall woman over by the coffee. "Kensi, this is Kendra Thompson."

"Everyone calls me Tommie. And I'm a grown woman, not a girl, Callen," she says, holding her hand out. She has a strong handshake. If Kensi were pressed, she'd describe Tommie as a resembling a young Tyra from the five million photos she's seen on Top Model. She is absolutely gorgeous.

Kensi smiles. There was a lot in the file Callen showed her. Tommie was a military brat like Kensi, going back three generations. Tommie had joined the Army, though, not the Marines like her dad, grandfather and three uncles and two brothers. She had come out as gay when DADT was repealed, received an honorable discharge six months later and signed up for NCIS two weeks after. She had nothing but exemplary reviews. Kensi had also noticed by reading between the lines that Hetty had picked Tommie for the team. So she was trustworthy.

"Everyone calls me Kensi," Kensi says. "If that wasn't in my file."

Tommie sits down at her desk and passes over a foot of files. "Time to get caught up." She gets up and sits down in Eric's chair. "These are our active cases and a few we just completed that might come back to bite us. I thought paperwork would be a good place to start."

"Perfect," Callen says. "Find you two later."

Kensi would sit next to Deeks for years, breathing in his smell, listening to his laugh. This is now, this is here, she thinks. She opens the first file and reads the summary.

She slips back into agent mode easier than she expected. When her phone alarm pings, she's surprised. "I am going to see my baby," she says.

Tommie smiles. "I'm going to get some decent food. Want anything?"

"I actually brought my lunch," Kensi says. She's so close to launching into how she carefully chooses her foods because she's Prairie's source of nutrients and yikes, even Ro and Abby don't want to hear that.

She spends half an hour feeding Prairie and doing tummy time with the baby. One of the older agents working there says, "She's got a big head."

"Yeah," Kensi says, a little rankled.

"I'm saying, some kids have big heads. So if she's a little slower with sitting up or walking, just remember it's probably more about her adjusting to that and not your fault or some horrible medical issue," the woman says. "My baby had a big head. Caused me a lot of worry."

"Thanks," Kensi says.

She doesn't want to let go of her big-headed baby ever ever but she manages it. She manages pumping again. She goes back to her desk and Tommie is already there. "We have actual surveillance," Tommie says. "Mind if I drive?"

"No," Kensi says.

It's a boring suburban street and Kensi is convinced she's done surveillance here before. She thinks it was Dom, it was so far back. Tommie says, "So, about your husband?"

"Yeah?" Kensi doesn't look up from her camera lens.

"I just wondered, what do you want? Like, never talk about him or be open to mentioning him?"

"Oh," Kensi says. "That's a good question." Her voice is suddenly thick. "Well, I think about him all the time. And he was my partner. So I guess it would be hard to never talk about him."

"Hanna and Callen talk about him sometimes, too. Good things," she says.

"I can't believe Sam said good things," Kensi says. She actually laughs.

They talk a little. She and Tommie have an okay rhythm. They get along better than she did when Marty was her new partner. But she didn't want to have sex with Tommie, it wasn't her second thought after they met for the first time. She wasn't smitten with Deeks the moment they met, but she was definitely in lust with him. It had made her very hostile. Sex thoughts at first sight weren't her usual thing. She usually fell into lust after longer acquaintance, when Jack made her laugh when they first talked, when she watched her next boyfriend walk away to get napkins at McDonalds.

She hasn't felt that way since Marty, either.

At 5 on the dot, she is at daycare, taking her whole life, her baby girl, into her arms. Prairie is clingy and whiny. Kensi is unbelievably tired, more than any day of shooting people and getting beaten up. MIssing Marty, feeling her way back to being the Kensi she used to be, the effective agent she should be. "You're a toughie," Kensi says. "Which is more than I can say for your mom."

One of the daycare ladies hands her a note from Hetty to come directly upstairs as soon as she is done for the day. "Okay," Kensi says, "I'll be taking you, okay?" Prairie kicks a little and closes her eyes.

Hetty is alone when Kensi walks in. She closes the door with a push of a button as soon as Kensi is inside. Then the screen fills with Abby and Gibbs's faces. "Did you bring Prairie? Hi, P-Dee!"

Prairie actually stirs at Abby's voice and Kensi turns the baby to see her. Abby waves manically and Gibbs just smiles. Hetty says, 'I thought it was best to bring Miss Sciuto into our circle of knowledge."

"I am really good at keeping secrets, don't worry. I know we have to worry about some horrible traitor moles in NCIS who I will find and root out like weeds, vicious poisonous weeds. But first we find Prairie's dad."

"I have missed you, Abby," Kensi says. Prairie makes a little whimper so Kensi shifts her close so she can burrow into Kensi's chest.

"Let's get on with it," Gibbs says.

"Okay," Abby says. "Here's the thing. In order to figure out where P Daddy is, I need to be able to identify him. Except all out records are wrong because they identified someone else as him. So I started there, trying to figure out when fingerprints and DNA were changed but it was no-go because those weedy jerks are very very thorough. Also, LAPD records are a lot easier to get into than ours. So."

Gibbs says, "Spit it out."

Abby looks a little abashed. "Okay, well, dna tests are actually pretty easy, I can just run any sample I want to check against Prairie's and if they're not the daddy, then they're not who we want. But fingerprints are a little more complicated."

"Thank you for your faith in my fidelity," Kensi says. "When did you get a dna sample of my daughter?"

"I took a swab for posterity. Like baby footprints. Also, I saw pictures of your hottie husband," Abby says. "Plus, it's obvious, anyway. She looks like him." Abby shrugs, clearly trying to avoid saying anything hurtful. Kensi feels warmed. "So," Abby says.

"Whatever are you dancing around, Miss Sciuto, please just get to it."

"There was this guy. This very very bad guy. We, I mean, Team Gibbs here, we took him down. And seized his stuff."

"His illegal stuff," Gibbs says. "Which we are not supposed to still be accessing."

"By stuff I mean a number of databases that contain information that should have been purged or destroyed or was never digitized. He was using it to find witnesses in protective custody," Abby says. "One of the things in the database we are definitely just storing and not accessing would be juvenile records."

"So you have Marty's 11 year old fingerprints," Kensi says. She doesn't wonder how Abby knew to look.

"Yup," Abby says. "So I've set up a bunch of alerts, not on the NCIS computers, for those fingerprints. And also, I have some sneaky little other alerts on who else might be looking for those fingerprints. I also set up alerts for basically any 6 feet blue eyed white guys in their mid 30s. I figure everything else can change."

Hetty says, "Is there anything else we can do?"

Gibbs says, "We have to assume they're watching you, Kensi. Hetty and I arranged some surveillance of their surveillance. You shouldn't notice it. Abby is watching the computers."

"So, nothing," Kensi says. Prairie yawns. "Okay, so we meet back …"

"I had a question," Hetty says. "Did it strike anyone else as odd how much publicity this story received? The death of an LAPD detective, while regrettable, is not as newsworthy as that."

"Yeah," Kensi shrugs. She gives in and whips out the boob for Prairie. She takes it immediately. "But he was killed by a serial killer he killed. That's news."

"But that wasn't in the story," Gibbs says. "Hetty's right. It was everywhere. Hell, my dad read something about it."

Abby types a little and then says, "Yeah. It was a national story and out to all sorts of big and small places. They all said the same thing - valiant k9 detective killed in the line of duty, married, and a link to a website."

"I never read," Kensi says. "I never read any of the stories. What website?"

"It's a LAPD site," Abby says. "Standard with a link to contribute to the widow and children's fund, and two pictures of Marty, in the academy and right before he died. Huh."

Kensi says, "So someone made sure it was news - like they wanted someone to know Marty was dead?"

"Maybe they weren't targeting any agent, possibly it was Detective Deeks they wanted all along," Hetty says.

"They got lucky," Gibbs says.

"Maybe if they hadn't, they would have made their own luck," Hetty says.

"We've got another avenue for investigation," Gibbs says. He actually waves at Prairie, behind Abby's back. Kensi waves her baby's little hand back at him.

She gets home even more exhausted than she thought possible. Monty helps by following her around and almost bumping into her. Prairie won't go to sleep so Kensi can't. She feels like she spends half the night crying and the other half having nightmares. And a third half breastfeeding. "Marty," she says. Monty moves his paw over her foot.


	3. Chapter 3

_She's a griever, my believer  
It's not a fever, it's a freezer_

Marty wakes up in a hospital. He's in a room with five other beds that have their own occupants and he's has that awesome cotton-coated head feeling that means painkillers. It's better than he expected. He stole a drug dealer's car and drove it west until it ran out of gas. Which happened to coincide with his infections reaching a point where he could not keep going. He didn't like the option of driving until he passed out so he parked the car on the side of the road, set it on fire and started walking. Worst case scenario, he ended up dead. Ending up in a hospital and not cuffed to the bed, which he is not, is actually best case scenario.

The nurses and doctors don't think much of him so he knows his homeless facade hasn't been hindered by his little tune-up. After two days, they let him go with his antibiotics and painkillers. He even got to watch some TV. He spent a lot of time in that halfway house watching Scandal and Teen Wolf. Now he's caught up on Stiles and Olivia. He wonders if they would ever date. If Stiles were older, maybe. This is your brain on painkillers, he thinks.

They give him clothes from the lost and found pile and he assumes the $5000 in cash he lifted from the drug car has been seized to pay his bills. He whines a little to someone in billing, drops a few legal terms and stands tall over the woman. It's the last part that makes him feel like shit, but he has needs. She gives him $200 of his money.

He's on a bus to Eugene, Oregon an hour later.

He was fingerprinted at the hospital and he was there three days so there's no way someone isn't tracking him. Luckily for him, the asshole they put on the bus detail is a newbie idiot. Marty starts slouching to look shorter. He steals some hipster's clear glasses while the kid sleeps. He's convinced newbie dumbass is the only agent on the bus, but he's probably meeting someone in Eugene.

He actually gets some sleep for once. Unlike some new agents for the forces of evil and greed, Marty knows how to disappear into the background.

The bus stop at Eugene is a stress point. There will be other bad guys. If they assume he took the bus, bus stops at cities are going to be watched. Probably not by more than one or two agents. He wonders if they got pictures of him buying the ticket. He bought more than one ticket, though.

Marty gets off the bus after Newbie but not last. He watches Newbie meet up with someone more experienced who manages to actually pull off casual. More Experienced ducks off to the side to smoke. Marty smiles.

Five minutes later More Experienced is unconscious, gun and wallet lifted. His phone is smashed. Marty goes two blocks out and doubles back until he finds a building he can get on top of. He likes roofs. Like the privacy, the view. This particular roof has a little umbrella over a crappy chair. Someone comes up here to smoke. "Smoking is bad for you," Marty says. He has a cigarette anyway. He needs to think.

Instead he watches the smoke and thinks of Kensi. He really hopes she hasn't found someone else. He pictures her naked. He rewinds the sex they had their honeymoon night. He pictures Kensi after she's come, her flushed face and the sweat in her hair. Someday, he is going to have sex again with Kensi.

XX

Kensi straps on her vest carefully. She is a lot more busty than she used to be. She is still an excellent shot. Her weapon is ready, she is ready, she follows Tommie out of the van, while Callen and Sam take lead. The hand signals have changed a little and Tommie is a very different operator than Deeks, she thinks. But mostly, everything is good. Rolling right along. She gets to her spot and sets up.

She makes one, two, three, four shots. Four men fall straight down. Sam quietly says, "Guess who's back."

"Never left," she says.

For the next 20 minutes, she doesn't think about anything but the mission. When Callen says "all clear," she finds herself waiting for Marty's voice.

When they get back to the Mission, she goes straight to daycare. She even 'accidentally' wakes up Prairie so she can snuggle. She's a great mom, she thinks, rolling her eyes at herself.

Hetty summons her. This time Eric is in the room. "Mr. Beale has joined our circle," Hetty says.

"You know I'm totally trustworthy, Kensi. You know," he says.

"As long as Hetty says so," Kensi says, smiling. She puts Prairie down on the table, her back against Kensi's front. Prairie looks around and beats her hand against Kensi's hand on her tummy.

Eric says, "I just want, you know, Prairie to meet her dad. Deeks is a pretty great guy."

"I agree," Hetty says. "But outside this room, right now, Detective Deeks *was* a great guy."

The screen comes on, with Gibbs and Abby leaning in. Abby says, "P-dee! Good to see you, girl."

Prairie gurgles. Abby says, "Okay, we have a lot to report. And we start with the good news, take it away, Eric."

Eric smiles and types on his keyboard. He says, "As of two weeks ago, Deeks was definitely alive." On the screen a series of documents from a hospital in South Dakota flash up. Kensi takes it all in, the list of injuries and infections. He weighed 30 lbs less. He would be skin and bones. There aren't pictures but she still picks up Prairie and holds her close to her breast. Prairie doesn't need to know.

"Wonderful," Hetty says. "Wonderful."

Abby says, "Fingerprints match and he is indeed Prairie's daddy. So, yay! We know for sure Kensi was right and P-dee's Daddy is out there."

"Or was," Kensi says. Now she knows for sure and now she suddenly doubts she'll ever see him again. Prairie whimpers. Kensi should be more hopeful, she thinks. She owes it to her daughter. "When did you guys get this?"

"Unfortunately, it was just last week. The hospital had him as an indigent John Doe. We're running all these searches and traces off private computers and not the NCIS ones. Way less power. Not that my home computer isn't pretty juiced but it's hard to compare to the ones here in Ops. From what we know of the guys we think had Deeks, they could use a lot more powerful computers."

Gibbs says, "What we know?"

"We'll get to that, it's complicated," Eric says. "Sorry."

"We are getting closer to finding the mole," Abby says. "I did trace some of the other tracers so we're narrowing things down. Definitely people in NCIS, FBI and LAPD. Maybe DoD. We do have some leads."

Gibbs and Hetty have identical looks of banked anger that make Kensi almost feel bad for the moles. Almost. "How big is this network," Kensi says.

"Big," Abby says.

"We're not sure where Deeks went from there," Eric says. "But we have some idea. But let's back up. Abby, you get the bad news."

"It's not exactly bad news, it's just. Okay, so we started looking through Deeks's family, because who are you trying to draw out when you send news and a photo out everywhere in the country? Who would care, right?"

"Ray," Kensi says.

Eric says, "I thought of that, but by using some kinda shady means, I found Ray and I found Nicole, neither of them went to the website. And they're both fine." He glances at Kensi and then back to Abby. "So with them out of consideration, like I said, we started checking on Deeks's family, trying to find connections or anything that stood out."

"Everything checked out on his father's side. The records on the Brandels go all the way back to Norway," Abby says. "So I started on his mom's side. His mom, Dolores Brandel, born Dolores Natasha Millet in 1962, ran away from home to marry Gordon Brandel in 1978, first and only child Martin A, otherwise known as Marty."

From Abby's side, one of the screens fills with pictures of Marty's mom. She didn't look like him, though she was definitely beautiful. Kensi can see her grow older, more worn down as the years pass. A decade with Gordon Brandel written on the hollow of her eyes and the long sleeves covering bruises.

Abby sounds sad. She says, "And I know you guys know most of the next 12 years. Dolly died in a car crash in 1999, with her mother. But."

Eric says, "Betty Green, Deeks's mom's mom, married to Greg Millet since 1955. Greg Millet died in 1985, okay? Except as I started to do the genealogy further back, it was just wrong."

"Wrong in a very familiar way," Abby says.

"Like the Sinclair project," Eric says. "Like that bookseller Abby told me about from DC."

"Deeks's grandparents had a nuclear bomb in their basement?" Kensi is beyond incredulous. "Come on, guys." She actually wishes Prairie would spit up or poop or something so she could leave and just stop all this.

"No nuclear bomb, but yes to the Soviet sleeper agent part," Eric says, quietly. He makes a gesture and images, documents flash all over the screens. "We have confirmation from some of the KGB records and other … stuff … that NCIS has."

Abby nods dolefully. "I know, weird, right?"

Kensi scans the documents and knows she's taking in all the information like an agent but part of her is in another place entirely, laughing hysterically at this. Then she turns on Hetty. "Did you know? Is this another of your secrets?"

"I had no idea," Hetty says, eyes wide. "I am not lying to you, Kensi. I did not know before right now." Hetty scans the documents again. She says, "I first noticed Mr. Deeks when he was with the Public Defender's office. He very ably defended a young man I had an interest in. I was impressed. And I keep my eye on people who impress me. I never knew any of this."

Kensi takes a very deep breath. "Okay, okay, I believe you. But seriously. Really?"

"Really," Abby says. "The Millets were matched up in Russia and came here to California in 1961. They never had a bomb or anything, but that doesn't mean they didn't have access to weapons and explosives. And we've confirmed they were part of a small network here in LA, separate from the other network where the bombs were involved. We have the records here in DC, like I said, from a bookstore owner, we found them a few years ago."

Kensi says, "Did Marty's mom know?" She can't fathom how anyone who was trained as an agent would let their own daughter stay married to Gordon Brandel.

"We think not, not when she ran away. Her parents basically cut her off as soon as she married Brandel," Abby says, still the same sad expression. "So, then, we started looking at when Dolly passed away."

Kensi rolls her eyes. "Let me guess, it was a fake and she's still alive out there." Abby and Eric don't laugh. "Oh my god."

Hetty says, "Why, is she in WitSec then?"

"Yes, her car accident with her mother was faked and we figured out she was in Witness Protection and, actually, even managed to locate her," Eric says, sounding exasperated. "Which was actually pretty hard to find, if you were wondering."

"We're not interested in the process," Gibbs says. "Tell us what happened."

"We will take it as given that both of you performed brilliantly to find this information," Hetty says.

"We did," Eric says quietly.

Abby says, "Dolly might not have known her parents were KGB, but the child of another family did know. Michael "Micky" Hartley was born in 1960. His parents died in 1990. We found pictures of him and Dolly hanging out as little kids -"

"Small network," Eric says. "The Millets and the Hartleys were both KGB, they knew each other and their handler. No one else, we think."

"Right, so in 1991, suddenly Micky is popping up on FBI & ATF's radar as a low-level gun runner. Guess what? He has access to a lot of Soviet hardware, even though he's in LA."

"But he was only arrested once in the next decade and the charges didn't stick," Eric says. "The ATF and NCIS think he's just been rising in the ranks ever since."

"The ATF guy on the case says he's sure Hartley killed his own parents. He may have murdered some other KGB sleepers he identified," Abby says.

Gibbs says, "Why? To get at their weapons cache?"

"Nope, basically just because he's kind of a sociopath," Eric says.

"Yeah, there's really no reason for it," Abby says. "Except for crazy evil."

Eric says, "Then suddenly, ATF makes a case and Micky goes away for 5 years. Guess what year?"

"We get it," Gibbs says. He sounds impatient, which isn't one of the 500 feelings Kensi has right now. She is alternating between angry and blown away. Gibbs says, "You said you had some idea who took Deeks. Let's get to it."

Abby says, "Later, we're going to tell you how difficult it was to get all this information. I am going to tell you, Gibbs. I am not even kidding how amazing Eric and I were. But for now, we found a connection between someone Hetty brought up and our friend Micky. A guy named Nigel Whartle. Ex-CIA, all around bad guy running a 'private security' firm, which is basically other bad guys for hire. For a lot. Whartle is the one employing the guy who got mugged in Eugene. Through a couple of shell companies, but yeah."

"What is the connection," Hetty says. She sounds tired. Kensi is definitely tired. Prairie is fitfully napping against Kensi's shoulder.

"When Micky got out of jail after three years, he was hired immediately by one of Whartle's shell companies," Eric says.

"So, basically, Marty's grandparents were KGB sleepers, and after one of their friends came after them, Marty's mom and grandmother faked their deaths and entered WitSec. Said friend is now working for someone who wants revenge on Hetty, so they fake Marty's death and kidnap him and torture him -" Kensi's voice breaks. She takes a deep breath and says, "And they did that to try to flush out his mom? Really?"

"Basically," Eric says. "Also, Hartley is pretty evil and probably enjoyed taking the grandchild of his parents' friends."

"Except we're not completely sure why Mrs. Millet and her daughter went into WitSec, I mean, we're pretty sure, but we just know they did. And we found them," Abby says. "Mrs. Millet passed away from for real natural causes four years ago. Dolly is still living in Wisconsin. We know where she is, because we have, you know -"

"Databases you are not supposed to be using," Hetty says. "Do you think Mr. Whartle and Mr. Hartley are close to finding Mrs. Brandel?"

"Yes," Abby says.

"We should go get her," Hetty says.

Eric says, "Not just notify the marshalls?"

"You get to explain to them how we know their witness is in danger and how we know where their witness is and make sure none of them are the moles we're worried about," Gibbs says.

Eric mumbles, "Okay."

"I have some contacts who could retrieve her," Hetty says. "One of the NCIS Red team."

Kensi says, "Callen's girlfriend?"

Gibbs smiles. "Summerskill."

"Once she arrives here, we will need to bring in the rest of the team," Hetty says. "But only the team here."

"And the Director," Gibbs says. "He can keep a secret. I don't want to be arrested for kidnapping a protected witness."

"We have a plan," Hetty says.

Kensi concentrates on the road driving home from doggie daycare. She has to drive safe for Prairie even if Prairie is intermittently wailing and snuffling. Sometimes the baby is so loud, Monty barks, like he wants her to be quiet. Or like he's taking her side against Kensi. "Not my fault," she nearly screams as they pull into the parking lot. She pounds her hands on the steering wheel.

After wrangling the car seat, her bag, and Monty on his leash into the elevator, she lets herself relax. As close as she will get to relaxing, she guesses. It's so much information to think about.

She feeds Monty and brushes his teeth. Prairie whines from her spot on the couch. Monty looks dolefully at Kensi and then runs to the bedroom to secure his place on the bed. "Don't worry," she mutters. "Not taking your side of the bed, Monty."

She changes the baby's diaper, feeds Prairie and then rocks her until she's asleep. She looks down at her little girl's closed eyes and long lashes. "So I guess you're partly KGB, bug. Which is weird. I mean, Russian. Not KGB. That's a job, that's not, where you're from. Right. Still Norwegian-American which is very important to your dad. Who is somewhere out there." She sighs. She should pump and eat something more than a slice of bread and a banana for dinner. She just wants to sleep.

She grabs her phone and calls her mom. "Mommy, can you come over?" People keep telling her she should ask for help. She falls asleep on the couch and only wakes up when her mom is knocking on the door.


	4. Chapter 4

_I believe her, I`m a griever now  
She's a griever, my believer_

Tommie says, "So your mom's moved in, or just mostly?"

"Just mostly," Kensi says. "I have a guest bedroom, and she has that huge house. I think she doesn't mind sleeping over sometimes."

"It sounds like it's more sleeping over a lot," Tommie says. They're sitting in the car, watching.

"Okay, sure." Kensi smiles. She does not look at her phone. She is not waiting for a text to let her know Dolly is in LA and at the Mission. She is very much not dreading telling Sam and Callen about all the lying she's been doing. They will understand. They've lied to her, too. For the same reason. "But," she says. "Basically I suck at being a working single mom."

Tommie says, "It's not like you have a job that's 9 to 5."

"Still feel like a failure," Kensi says.

"Isn't that universal for moms?" Tommie laughs. "I don't know any moms who don't think they're failing completely at being parents."

Kensi shrugs. "I don't know many other moms. We all think we suck?" She doesn't know any other moms.

"I know five. But that's two lesbian couples and one straight girl."

"You're not counting me, right?" Kensi smiles at her.

"Oh, of course, I'd never count you as a friend," Tommie says, smirking.

"Really?"

"Of course I count you as a friend, but I wasn't counting you in my list of moms who feel likes failures."

Kensi doesn't look at her phone. "So, really, you know we all think we're screwing up?"

Tommie says, "Yup. You know, if everything single thing you're doing is wrong according to someone, why not just run with it?"

"Just run with it," Kensi says, slowly. "I should give her scissors? Let her sleep face down?"

"No, but I mean, maybe just stop judging yourself. Fine, you suck. So put that aside and just be. Be that mom."

Kensi rubs her forehead. "That is way too zen for me. I mean, she's perfect. She's adorable and she has this smile, like, it's the most amazing thing. And I look at her and I see Marty, and I feel this sense of responsibility. He was the one who was good with kids. I was supposed to do this with him because he'd be good at it." Oh, good, Kensi thinks, she's starting to cry. She takes a deep breath. "Anyway."

She stares out the car window at the people coming and going. She takes three pictures. She says,"Were you telling the truth when you told that guy you're a gold star lesbian?"

"Yeah," Tommie says. "Only time I've done anything with guys was work, and." She shrugs.

Kensi looks her in the eye. She knows. The awful sorority of women in the jobs they do. She says, "I know."

Tommie nods. They go back to surveillance. Kensi's phone buzzes. "We need to go back," she says. She shows Tommie the message from Hetty.

She comes into the Mission and thinks how weird it is they aren't at the boatshed. But Dolly isn't a witness they need to interrogate. She's something else entirely. For the first time, Kensi doesn't go straight to the daycare for Prairie.

Paris smiles at Kensi and Tommie. Dolly is sitting on the couch. It hasn't been replaced, she can still see Marty shrugging off a tapestry.

"Hey, Paris," Tommie says. "Who is this?"

"Dolly Brandel," Kensi says. Dolly looks startled.

"That is not the name I was given," Paris says. She doesn't look pleased.

"Yeah, it's confidential, actually, sorry. We're worried about leaks. Not you, specifically, but we don't know who we can trust." Kensi pushes back her hair. "I'm Kensi," she says. It's like ripping off a bandaid to say it, but she may as well. "Kensi Deeks."

"Oh," Dolly says. "Oh."

"So technically," Kensi says. "This is my mother-in-law. And we should move this to somewhere more private. We need to keep it very very under wraps, even here." She must sound like a lunatic. But someone in NCIS helped Whartle's people fake Marty's death. Maybe they even watched Kensi crying. Maybe they're looking at her right now, knowing where Marty is and laughing.

Paris nods and they adjourn to one of the tiny rooms for meetings on the top floor. Dolly sits down again. She stares at Kensi until Kensi looks her in the eye. "Sorry," Kensi says, looking back at Paris and Tommie. "This is going to be a long story, I'd rather wait until Callen and Sam get here."

Tommie says, "Why don't I get, you know?"

Kensi appreciates Tommie doesn't say Prairie.

Part of her, though, is screaming, no no no, no one touches my baby no one. Can she trust Tommie? If Tommie is one of the moles, she'll be leaving to notify the bad guys.

Kensi says, "That's a good idea, thanks." Kensi is trusting her gut. She is hopefully not wrong.

Tommie smiles and leaves.

It's three minutes before Sam and G come upstairs but it feels longer with Paris looking at her and Dolly avoiding looking at her. Tommie isn't back and Prairie is certainly fine, she has to be fine.

She stops herself from laughing when Callen comes in and starts smiling as soon as he see Paris. It's so weird to see him happy like that. Paris smirks and says, "Hey, apparently I was sent to retrieve Kensi's mother-in-law. Which I didn't know."

Callen and Sam look confused and thoughtful. Kensi says, "Surprise. Guess who went into Witness Protection and didn't actually die? We think the lunatic she's being protected from thought faking Marty's death was a great way to find her. We also think they were getting pretty close to finding her, so we had Paris bring her here. Unfortunately, said lunatic is working someone who definitely has moles here in NCIS and FBI, so we're trying to keep things under wraps. Sorry for not giving you the full poop, Paris."

"Faked his death," Sam repeats.

Kensi smiles, for real. "Yeah. We have confirmation from three weeks ago. He made contact with me when -, a few months ago. Nothing since then, but we've been able to track him, at least a little."

Sam smiles and suddenly Kensi is being crushed in a hug. "That is awesome," Sam says.

"Yeah," Callen says. "It's amazing. But what's the rest of the story?"

"There is a lot of it to tell," Hetty says as she quietly glides in.

Kensi hears Prairie crying a few seconds before Tommie walks in. She has her arms out for her baby and then there she is. Prairie looks up at Kensi, her eyes wide and mercifully stops crying without Kensi having to give her a boob. Over Prairie's head, Kensi sees Dolly watching them.

Marty never ever told her stories about his dad, and only a few about his mom. Kensi is still angry. It's an emotion she can hold on to: protect Prairie, be mad.

Hetty is explaining things. Tommie, Sam and Callen keep looking at her and Dolly. Kensi says, "I know all this, and I doubt Mrs. Brandel is learning much new."

Hetty nods.

Kensi sits at her desk, Prairie in her arms. Dolly sits across from her at Sam's desk. "I guess that's my grandchild," Dolly says. She smiles. She doesn't look like Marty at all.

Dolly says, "Your baby looks like Marty."

"Yeah," Kensi says. "A little." Prairie doesn't care about Dolly, she is too busy tugging at Kensi's shirt and trying for her hair. "Come on, Bug, you know hair's off limits."

Dolly says, "Boy or girl?"

"Girl," Kensi says. "Her name is Prairie." Prairie Blye Deeks, PBD, Pretty Big Deal, Kensi thinks, rattling around in her head.

Once a month, Marty would wake with a start from a nightmare. She didn't ask but she knew. If someone looked at Prairie wrong, Kensi would rip off their kneecaps without taking a breath.

"I know," Dolly says. "I was a shitty mother." She sits back in Sam's chair, arms crossed. "I wasn't surprised when I found out about my parents. I never thought they even liked each other. And they were never very impressed with me. It was fun living with her again." She rolls her eyes. It's a surprising show of spunk for the quiet, scared woman she's been so far.

Kensi hmmms. She bounces Prairie on her lap.

"I do know what you're thinking. I agree, honestly. I was 17 when my baby was born. Which isn't an excuse, but I tried. I always felt like I was failing, again." Dolly looks down at her hands in her lap and for the first time, Kensi can see something of Marty in her.

"I always feel like I'm failing," Kensi says. "I made my mom move in because I'm such a failure."

Dolly smiles again. "Yeah? I bet you're not a failure at all. She looks like a very happy baby."

"Yeah," Kensi says. "Did Marty have a big head? People tell me Prairie has a big head. I just, I wondered."

"He did, actually. He was basically all head and hair until he was five. He was always skinny." Dolly leans forward.

Kensi brings Prairie to her. Dolly sets her down on her lap and kisses her forehead. "Turns out I'm your grandma, little girl." Dolly's laugh is just like Marty's, but quieter.

To protect Dolly, even from NCIS, they move her to a safe house Hetty owns. The daycare has two new workers and the ones who were there, Hetty relates, are staying with a friend who needs some home care help.

Kensi stops by randomly twice. Dolly is so patient with Prairie, Kensi feels like a loser all over again.

"Apparently, it's not that hard to make you feel like a failure," Tommie says.

Apparently, Kensi always ends up oversharing with her partners. She says, "It's just, sometimes I hear her crying and I'm just, please, please, stop."

"She's very loud sometimes."

"She's supposed to be loud," Kensi says. "And I'm supposed to be able to listen and make her feel better."

"You expect a lot from yourself," Tommie says. "Of all the moms I know, you are officially the biggest loser. In your head, not in reality."

"I usually do things well," Kensi says. "At least I'm excelling at something." The older Prairie gets, the farther Kensi is away from being a happily married agent, the more she feels like she's drowning.

xx

It's not that Eugene doesn't have its pluses, but since Marty's entire experience of the city has come from dumpster diving and living off the grid, he's glad to leave. Three weeks of living off refuse and not showering and hanging out with perfectly nice people who somehow think they look good in dreads. He's not a fan. They were very nice to him. They helped him get food and slightly cleaner clothes. They nodded when he said he didn't want his picture up on twitter or facebook. (Living off the grid didn't include not having the latest iPhone.)

Finally, someone was driving to Los Angeles. Marty had gas money, he got a seat in the back. He's watched Northern California go by out the window and then the central coast and now he's back. He has no plan but he feels like, in Los Angeles, he's got the home field advantage.

He wonders if Monty is okay. Even if Kensi moved away and married someone else, his worst case scenario because he is going to be very bad at competing with someone who has all their teeth, even if. She probably kept Monty.

Tree in the front seat says, "Man, Mort, someone is looking for you."

"What?" Marty sits up straight, his hand in his backpack, around the gun.

"Chibs put a picture up, like, you were just in the background, last week. And then these guys show up, like, questioning people. Chibs and Two and Manuel. Chibs just tweeted about it."

"Stop now," Marty says.

Seth, the driver, says, "Here? This is fucking nowhere, man, I have no idea where we are."

"Good. When they ask you where you left me, you can tell 'em the absolute truth, that you have no idea."

"People are looking for you," Seth says slowly.

"Yup," Marty says.

Seth make three rapid right turns and then pulls over. "So get the fuck out, fucker."

Marty starts walking. He really has no idea where the hell he is. LA is really fucking big. He doesn't recognize this street, he doesn't know these street names. Maybe he can walk to the Mission. If they've left it, there will still be cameras. Not that it's easy to find super secret locations in Los Angeles, how do you even tell your realtor that's what you want? His brain is fried. After all this time trying to be incognito, he needs to be found. Unfortunately, the one thing he's sure about is that he's in a pretty deserted warehouse district. He keeps walking.

He can't remember the last time he had a real meal or enough to drink. He's finished the antibiotics the doctor gave him but he's betting he's still got something rattling around in him because he feels light-headed and hot and weak. Weak is not a good look for him right now. He stands up straight as he walks and gets his game face glare on. He's a crazy motherfucker, he's projecting that as hard as he can. Acting, he thinks.

He isn't acting.

Three more blocks and now the warehouses are much less empty. People are working in there, he can hear them. He hears machines whirring and buzzing and people talking.

A black car comes around the corner, drives past him. Then it stops and start to back up right there.

"Seriously?" These asswipes looking for him just get fucking lucky, just like that they find him. Marty runs. He hears footsteps running behind him.

He tries doors as he passes. Five doors and he finally gets one to open. He's in some kind of sweatshop, people sewing at stations. Maybe they're getting paid well, he thinks. It's probably unfair to jump to sweatshop automatically. He's made it halfway through the floor before people notice him. A man stands up and yells. Marty spins and looks for cameras. He spots three security cameras and tries to smile at all three of them. "Hey, Eric! Say hi to Hetty for me!" He waves. That should work.

He takes his gun out of his backpack and waves it around. People start running in the opposite direction. Marty finds stairs and starts heading up. He's in the manager's office looking over the empty floor when the first bad guy comes in. He tries standing back from the window but then he hears the steps.

Marty pushes the door open just as he hears the steps close in. He manages to knock over bad guy 1 and he barrels past bad guy 2 with all his speed.

It's not enough because it's been more than a year since he was in anything approaching good shape. He ducks under a sewing station. Shots ring out. He grasps his gun with his left hand and rolls to the next station. He has some idea where the other two are now and squeezes off one shot. He has nine bullets, he can't be firing willy-nilly.

He hears some kind of impact, someone swears. He crawls under stations towards the door. Someone had to have called the cops. Maybe Eric will notice. Maybe there's some sort of cavalry coming. He'd be happy with cops. He'd love to get arrested. Maybe Bates is still there. He'd give him a heart attack since Marty is officially dead. But Bates is made of very sturdy stuff.

Only one gun is firing at him as he makes it to the edge of the stations. He just needs to run to the door. His left hand hurts. He can't even pull a trigger with his right hand anymore. Life is so darned hard. It would suck to die in LA and not even see Kensi.

He pushes over the stations and runs to the door. He hears the shot and feels the burn in his shoulder and how it turns into pure bright white pain. But he can still run and he's out on the street. People are running in the corners of his vision. They came out, they milled around, they took off again when they saw him come out, bleeding.

There's two badly parked cars, one of which is the one he saw backing up to get him. He runs between them to a street where he hears traffic. He would dearly love to be stopped by some cops right about now. Cops, cops, cops, please come running.

Someone shoots at him. He ducks behind a car, glances through the windshield and back window and sees two guys, again. Both windows shatter as they shoot again at him. He guesses they have more ammo than he does. Bright side, he thinks, looking at his arm, they wasted a bullet on winging him.

He can't believe the cops aren't already here. LAPD response time sucks. How far out is he?

The street is pretty quiet because everyone has gotten the hell out of there which is nice, because he can hear one of the bad guys say "Did we hit him? Is he down?" He peeks over the car and sees a nice easy center mass of a target. He may not be good with his left hand shooting, but he doesn't really need to be.

Shots fired, he runs. He finds a car with its windows intact to hide behind on the next street over. He is still bleeding which isn't helping his planning capabilities. Or his view of the future.

He hears the sweetest sound in the world: the loveliest voice shouting "federal agents." He thinks about standing up but that's just setting up the horrible ironic moment when he gets shot right in front of his wife. He's already been shot, he doesn't need another bullet.

But he does say loudly, "Over here, please."

"Deeks?" That is definitely Kensi.

"Marco?" He amuses himself. It's a sign of his strong character and wit and resilience that he makes these jokes. He's also missing teeth, criminally underweight and probably unattractive to look at, he's got to offer a little more.

"Oh, Polo, fucking damn it," Kensi says as she rounds the car. She looks amazing.

"You look amazing," he says.

"Oh, god, you look awful," Kensi says. They were standing inches apart. She even smells great.

"You smell great," he says.

Then she is hugging him, and he can smell her up close. He clings to her vest. "Hey," he says. He means to tell her, he needs to tell her it's okay if she found someone else because he was shown pictures but she thought he was dead and it's totally okay. "It's okay," he says.

"Yeah," she says. She pulls him up standing. "It is." She brushes the tears off her face. "I would kiss you -"

"Maybe later," he says. A stunning statuesque woman in an NCIS vest comes up behind Kensi.

"Get in the car," Pretty Lady says. "We only took out two, and they had plenty of time to call for reinforcements."

It's a new car. He says, "Hey, new car." He and Kensi are in the back seat and she's already pulled out a first aid kit. "So, hey, Kens, how are you?"

"Better than you," she says, sniffling. "I'm good. I'm good, you're alive. I love you," she says. "This shirt is disgusting."

"I totally agree," he says. He must be bleeding more than he thought. He can barely sit up. He's sagging into her lap. But he has to say it. "It's okay if you're seeing someone else. I saw pictures, it's okay. You thought I was dead."

"Thanks, but, I'm not," she says. She laughs. "I'm really not."

"They were weirdly cropped, but you were with this guy." He can barely keep his eyes open. He flinches as Kensi cleans out his bullet wound.

"Deeks, I have not even kissed someone since you died," she says. "Since we thought you died. Not even for work. I don't care what you saw."

"That is really good," Marty says. "I was trying to be cool, but I wasn't really okay." Then he blacks out.


	5. Chapter 5

_Let's go wait out in the fields with the ones we love._

"He really just passed out," Tommie says.

"Yes," Kensi says. Her husband. Marty. In her lap.

She hears three separate shots just as the car is hit from behind. Tommie shouts. She says, "Their back-up is here."

"Fuck," Kensi says. She shifts to cover Deeks more with her torso and draws her gun. She looks through the back window and fires three shots. Tommie speeds forward.

Kensi shoots three more shots at the black sedan next to them. She saw the flash of the guns when they shot at the car. She isn't doing more than slowing the others down slightly. "We need to stay alive until our reinforcements come," Tommie says.

"Got it," Kensi says. She's doing her best scan, identify and shoot through the back three windows while covering Deeks with her body. She has a vest, he doesn't.

Kensi is an excellent shot, Tommie is an excellent driver. Between the two of them, they make it through the next five minutes alive, car still running, and with two of the trailing cars taken out. Two replaced them. Kensi says, "How many do they have?"

"Enough," Tommie says. "How long until our cavalry comes along?"

Eric comes over the comm saying, "Callen and Sam are twenty blocks out from you guys. Are you heading for a hospital or here?"

Hetty breaks in and says, "Hospital. Let me give you the address." She does so and Tommie punches it into the GPS.

Kensi says, "Turn left in two miles, right?"

Tommie nearly laughs. A car comes straight at them from the opposite direction, Tommie swerves hard to the left. Kensi squeezes off two shots and hears the oncoming car spin out behind them. "They've got a ton of people, Hetty."

"Yes," Hetty says. "Once we identified Mr. Deeks from the security video, we dispatched you two to the scene and started doing more work here. We've identified -"

Kensi doesn't hear the next part because this time a car on the right is shooting at them. Two bullets whiz over her head as she ducks. She shoots back.

Hetty clears her throat over the comm. She says, "Eric and Kai discovered Nigel Whartle is already in town. He travels with a fair amount of security. He has every reason to want Mr. Deeks dead."

Tommie says, "You'll tell me what all that means when we get out of this, right?"

"Absolutely," Hetty says. "We'll all meet at the hospital and I will explain all of it."

They're boxed in by four cars and nothing Tommie can do can get them out. The back car rams them into the front car and then all the cars stop with a screech, in the middle of a pretty deserted street.

Kensi says, "I can carry Marty, maybe you can cover."

"Kensi, you can not. You may be able to handle his spindly skinny boy weight, but he's still over 6 feet of person to carry and not helping you with any of it."

"Get out of the car," shouts one of the gunmen.

"Nope," Kensi says, loudly.

"We've got you surrounded and outnumbered."

"Sure," Tommie says, quietly. "We hadn't figured that part out."

Kensi's heart is beating out of her chest and she can't catch her breath. She can not lose Marty now. It's not fair. "I'm just going to shoot all of them," she says.

"That is not a plan," Tommie says.

Kensi picks out her first four targets and get ready to shoot. Then two more cars come barreling into the street, crashing into two of the cars. Tommie says, "Hey guys," and starts the car again. Kensi fires her four shots, hits every single one. Tommie rams into the car in front of them until she's pushed it out of the way and takes off.

They hear shots behind them and through their comms. Hetty says, "That's Whartle, Mr. Callen."

More shots way back in the distance now, much louder in their comms. "And that's Whartle dead," Sam says.

"We'll be at the hospital in 10," Tommie says. "Maybe 8."

It takes them 7 minutes. They're met by doctors and nurses. They move Marty from the back seat to a gurney and Kensi follows them. "I'm his wife," she says.

Kensi paces. She takes off her vest. Tommie comes in from parking the car. She tosses Kensi her go bag. "You've got blood on you," she says.

Kensi changes in the bathroom and scrubs her hands until they're red. Her breasts ache. She should pump.

Hetty arrives with two of her scary day care ladies. One of them hands Prairie to her. The other puts Kensi's diaper bag on the chair next to her. Kensi listens to Hetty updating Tommie while she feeds Prairie. "I think this is more soothing for me than you, Bug," Kensi whispers.

Prairie is napping in Kensi's arms when Callen and Sam arrive. Eric shows up two minutes later. He tells Hetty and all of them that they've identified a bunch of Whartle's moles. They've also rounded up pretty much everyone working for Whartle in LA. "Lots of calls from SecNav and other agencies." He sits down next to Kensi and smiles at Prairie. "Does Prairie know her daddy's home?"

"I haven't told him or her yet," Kensi says.

The doctor comes out and Kensi stands, carefully holding Prairie to her chest. "I'm his wife," she says.

The doctor lists Marty's immediate problems: dehydration, malnutrition, blood loss, lingering infection. They're dealing with all that. The things that will take longer to fix, she files away to think about later. "When I can see him? Is he conscious now?"

The doctor gestures to the left and back. Kensi has twenty steps to decide how she's going to break the news. She hasn't thought of anything to say as she opens the door.

They've cleaned Marty up. He smiles when he sees her and she can see some of his missing teeth. That's a long term problem and she's filed it away. He looks confused at the baby.

"Hey," she says. "Good to see you." She sits down next to his bed. Hetty has worked her magic and Marty has his own private room. "So, so." Prairie is awake, a little. Kensi lifts her and puts her delicately on the space on the bed by his hip. "This is Prairie, our little girl."

"Whoa," he says. Prairie bursts into wails. "I know, kid, I know." He picks her up with his left hand and rests her on his chest. "Wow."

They're both silent watching Prairie. She looks like Marty and Kensi sees some of herself in the baby's crying face. Marty can't stop looking at Prairie and then at her and then back at their little girl. Kensi's dreamed of this a million times but she never thought of Marty quietly crying.

"I was pregnant when you were taken," she says. Her voice breaks. "Then I was transferred to DC and I had her and I got your letter and I came back. So you're a dad." She's going to melt into the floor, she's so exhausted. She feels like she's just finished running 20 miles with her regulation pack on her back. And now she can rest.

"She's pretty, you know," Marty says. "You're amazing." Prairie has stopped wailing and is looking more querulous.

"She is amazing," Kensi says. "Her fine motor skills are really good and she's good on all the brain, thinking, making connections milestones, but her gross motor skills are farther behind. I mean, those markers are all kind of bullshit, like, the average child does this by this time, but it always varies. She has a big head. It's harder for her, balancing and things." Kensi takes Prairie back before she starts wailing again. "Sorry, sorry. I'm just so tired."

"I meant, you're amazing, Kensi. Prairie is awesome, and I know you did that. All by yourself, basically." He puts his hand over hers on Prairie's back. "Also, wow. We made a baby."

"Yeah," she says. "We did."

They sit quietly again. She says, "But now we both get to do this because it's really hard just me. And she should have everything."

She gets the next day off. She waits until then to tell him about his mother. All about his mother. He looks angry but all he does is listen. She says, "Do you want to see your mom? They're setting her up with her own place. She still needs protection, like you and me because Micky Hartley is still out there somewhere. But Prairie really loves her."

"I'm sure," he says. "I don't want to see her. I don't. You and Prairie should keep up whatever you're doing, but leave me out of it."

"Why?"

"Just because," he says. "I don't want to talk about it, okay?"

"Okay," she says, nodding. "Okay."

xx

After they tell him he'll be going home for at least few days, Marty feels like he has to have the talk with Kensi. He says to her, "I don't have to go home with you. I mean, people change. We haven't been together for more than a year. It's okay if we don't, you know -"

"Stay married?" Kensi looks appalled. It's a good look on her, but there aren't many bad ones. "Are you really trying to get out of us, us being married?"

"No, no. I just wanted to be fair. I like being married. But we weren't even married six months, I want to make sure you know you're not, like, trapped. You don't have to." He shrugs. "You don't have to."

"Like," she says, slowly. "Oh, you think maybe I don't want to? Just obligation?" She smiles. "Nope. Not happening," she says. "You are stuck with me."

"Good," he says. "Good." That went about as well as his brand new therapist said it would, but he had to try.

Hetty tells him she will take care of all the legal issues. "The official story," she says, "Is that you were in a coma as a John Doe and someone else was mistakenly identified as you. Kensi had already set aside the insurance bequest and other monies from your death so those will all be quietly returned. You have retired from the LAPD."

"So, I don't have a job?" He isn't that upset. He'll stay home with Prairie and all the future little babies he and Kensi make.

"You can if you want. NCIS is still open to you, when you're ready." Hetty smiles warmly.

"That's good," he says. "So who's paying for all my extensive medical care and therapy?"

"Don't worry," Hetty says. "It's all covered."

"Okay," Marty says. "I won't worry."

xx

Dolly takes her own son not wanting to see her really well. So well, she willingly comes over to help Kensi and her mom get the apartment ready for Marty to move back in. It isn't actually that much work. "But you hate cleaning," Kensi's mom says.

"Yes, I do," Kensi says. "But it's mostly Prairie's fault. She makes a huge mess."

"She's not even really crawling," Dolly says.

"She's good," Kensi says. Prairie gurgles in her bouncy chair. "Really skilled for a 9 month old."

She picks Marty up at the hospital and brings him home. She smiles nervously. He smiles nervously. Monty comes barreling out of the bedroom and runs at Marty faster than she has ever seen Monty move.

Prairie makes her concerned noise, which is different from her happy noise and her sad crying and her hungry crying. Kensi says, "It's a Monty Marty reunion, baby. Say that five times fast."

"You're the best, yes, you are," Marty is saying. To the dog. Monty licks his face again.

"I'm going to put Prairie down for her nap, join when you're done and cleaned up."

So that gets them over the first hump, she thinks.

They talk in spurts and nothing really catches fire. Luckily, between Prairie and Monty, it gets them through to dinner and after.

"She's asleep," Marty says very quietly. "And now we sleep next to her."

"Are we going to have the cosleeping discussion again?" Kensi pulls off her tank top and lies down next to Prairie, like every night.

"You move when you sleep. You roll around. What if I do? She's really small."

"She's gained a lot of weight," Kensi says. "I mean, she's not really small, okay? She's a good size for her age and for being breastfed."

"Sensitive spot, huh?" He smiles and lies down on the other side of Prairie. "Okay, our daughter is exactly the right size for Prairies, and she is a Prairie so we're good. And you've stopped moving when you sleep and I won't move either."

"I've never rolled onto her and you won't either," she says.

"Got it," he says. "So what do we do when we're not sleeping and we want to have sex. Not tonight, I mean, but another night."

"We don't have to have sex in this bed," she says. "When we do it. Whenever that is. Hopefully soon, honestly," she says.

He reaches across and kisses her. It's a really good kiss. He sits back and smirks his stupid smile. Then he says, "You're looking at the gap, aren't you? Crowns're on Wednesday. It'll get better. How was the kiss, though, you liked that."

"I did," she says.

"Glad to get that over with, right?"

"Yes," she says. "God, we used to be able to talk for hours. Didn't we?"

"It's been a while," he says. "I think we have a good excuse."

"Yeah," she says. She falls asleep playing with Prairie's hair.

xx

He wakes up five times during the night. He watches Prairie breathe. After the fifth time, he gives up and gets out of bed. Monty follows him as he tries out the sofa and the loveseat. Finally he settles on the floor of the guest room, under the skylight.

He doesn't wake up until Kensi knocks on the door. "Hey," she says.

"Sorry," he says. "Sorry. I was worried I would wake up the baby, sorry."

"It's okay," Kensi says. She looks so excited for a minute and says, "Oh my god. I can do this." She puts Prairie in his arms and walks away, pushing off her underwear. "I'm taking a shower. I'm taking a shower, oh my god, a long one."

"Glad to help," he says. Prairie stares at him for a minute and then bursts out wailing. "This is how you react when Mom's not here. It's okay, it's a normal stage of development, according to the book your mom brought me when I was in the hospital. I am up to date on where you should be, and I know you won't be consoled by this, but Mom isn't gone forever, she's just showering without you. And loving every minute of it." His calm voice isn't working on Prairie but he didn't think it would. Monty tries to help by nudging Prairie with his nose but that doesn't help either.

After 10 minutes, Kensi comes into the room with her hair wrapped in a towel and otherwise naked. She looks amazing. "Thank you," she says.

"Written all over my face, right?"

"Yeah," she says. "I missed that." She smiles and bends to pick up Prairie. "Ooh, she smells stinky. That's all you."

"Is it?" He holds onto Prairie as he stands up.

"Yup," she says. "We can trade off. I'll do the next one."

After he changes the toxic waste dump Prairie somehow created in her diaper, he puts on her new one and starts looking at her clothes. Babies have the cutest clothes. Little leggings and tiny socks and three dresses with ruffles. "You've got quite the wardrobe, Prairie. What do you feel like wearing, baby casual? Baby formal?"

"Don't dress her, she hasn't had breakfast," Kensi says.

"We feed her naked?"

"Have you seen her eat? When it's not boob?"

"No, but I'm excited." It's a little exciting to watch and help. But mostly it's gross.

As soon as they give up on feeding Prairie any more solid food, Kensi grins again. She hands him the baby and says, "Why don't you clean her up?"

"We're parenting together here, just to be clear. Not just you enjoying having someone else here to do the gross stuff," he says. He's mostly joking.

"Totally," she says. "No, really, I don't mean to take over all the parenting decisions. We can do things different."

"No, we're good. I don't mean to," he says. He holds her waist with his free hand and kisses her again.

"Thanks for getting baby food all over my hair," she says. She is smiling, at least.


	6. Chapter 6

_Because we'll all arrive in heaven alive_

Kensi bought him one of those old man daily pill boxes. Marty rolls his eyes at it every time he opens it in the morning and before he goes to bed. He has a lot of pills in there. Pills for anxiety, pills for sleeping, pills for generally not being upset about losing a year of your life. The latter come in blue. He likes sleeping through the night so he's not too resentful of those pills, it's just the rest.

"I know you hate the pills," his shrink says. "So we'll try to see if you can do a lower dose." Then she lists the side effects he might have from reducing the dosage.

"That doesn't sound fun," he says.

"You kinda just have to power through, sorry."

So six weeks out of the hospital, he has dry mouth and constipation. It's damn sexy. He can tell how turned on Kensi is, too. Their dirty talk is all about how she dealt with her constipation when she was pregnant.

It's like an ice bath every time this comes up, and he would really like to make Kensi happy and also have sex. But he's supposed to power through.

xx

"So you're moving," Tommie says. "You okay with that?"

"I'm not attached to the apartment," Kensi says. "It's fine."

Tommie makes a face. She goes back to surveillance. "It is fine. It's good," Kensi says. "He can't sleep. We need some places with more windows, more space."

"And those're everywhere," Tommie says. "Any luck?"

"Actually, yes. It's a condo in Hancock Pack, the whole living room has one wall that's windows. He loves it. And there's a pool." Marty better get a job as soon as he's recovered if they're going to afford it long-term, but that's something she will worry about later.

"Isn't he on his third or fourth surgery today?"

"Yesterday," Kensi says. "Four more to go. And he's still not talking to his mom, and his therapist is readjusting his meds, and Prairie is teething and we haven't had sex yet and it's really frustrating."

Tommie stares at her. "Okay," she says. She starts humming "Accentuate the Positive." Kensi thinks punching her would be mostly wrong. Justified, but still wrong.

"I hope I get to shoot someone soon," Kensi says.

Since Marty's recovering from his surgeries, Prairie's at day care. Kensi picks her up and heads home. She has packing left to do, and baby to take care of, and so much to do again.

At least she's coming home to someone. Which is her mother. "He's asleep, in the bed, at least," she says as Kensi walks in.

"Did you make dinner? Is that what we smell?" Kensi grins.

"I did. Marty said it was great," she says. "And I can stay until you get Prairie in bed."

"You're the best," Kensi says.

She is the best three nights in a row, and thanks to a a round the clock stakeout, she doesn't even talk to her own husband for four days. She watches him sleep. She gets text messages from him and sends him a few.

She wakes up already tired on Saturday morning. She reaches for Prairie and she's not there. She hears Marty saying, "I got her, Kens."

"Okay, good," she says. She stretches and takes a moment to take over the whole bed. It feels wonderful.

She forces herself to get up when she hears Prairie crying. "Here I come," she says.

Two hours later, Prairie is drowsy in her bouncy chair and Marty says, "Hey, wanna fuck?"

She looks down and laughs. "You are so romantic."

"We're married, who needs romance?" He has that damn smile and his pretty pretty eyes and she really super wants to.

She says, "Okay." She can't stop laughing. "I hope I remember how."

"It's like riding," he says. "A bicycle, me, whichever."

"Your dirty talk is still amazing," she says. She's already up and he's steering her with the hand not in the cast into the bedroom. She stops at the doorway. "We can't leave Prairie in her bouncy chair. I think that's bad parenting."

He turns around and moves the bouncy chair towards the bedroom, right outside the door. "She's actually already asleep," he says. "We don't have to do the full two hour thing -"

"When did we ever do two hours?"

"Was that someone else?" He kisses her.

She pulls him back into the bedroom. She takes a moment to feel the weight of him on top of her. She just wants to wrap her legs around him.

He sits back. "We can't let her sleep in the bouncy chair. I'm just going to move her to her crib. Okay?"

"Good plan," she says. She gets naked in the bed. She wonders if he wanted to do that. She tries to arrange herself in a sexy manner. She used to do that pretty well. She drove him crazy with lust.

"You did drive me crazy," he says as he walks in. "You were talking to yourself. Prairie is out like a light. I made sure there was nothing in the crib and I laid her on her back. She was doing that adorable thing where her little nose was twitching." He gets in bed and on top of her again. "You still in the mood?"

"Yes, yes I am." She spreads her legs and starts pushing his sweats down. She says, "Is Monty okay?"

"Yes," he says.

It's only twenty minutes but it's the best twenty minutes of her week. "That was good, right?" he says.

"Definitely," she says. "See this smile? Genuine smile."

"Next time we'll shoot for that two hours," he says. "I don't mean that kind of tantric thing, I mean two hours with foreplay and some other fun thrown in."

xx

"Pushing the baby carriage, pushing the baby carriage," Marty sings. It's actually a stroller. But he's tried rhyming with stroller and he keeps ending up on bowler. He likes rhyming with carriage. So many choices.

He sings a little bit more until Prairie makes her just pooped noise. He stops the stroller when the smell hits. He comes around and it's a monster poop. It's an overflowing diaper, on the stroller, on her dress kind of massive poop. "Wow," he says.

"Do you want to hear the whole story of how I manfully cleaned it up and got her dressed?"

Kensi looks up from where she's sitting on the toilet. "No," she says.

He really wanted to tell that story. He's been up and down and snappish and lacking sleep and he's worried he's taking all this mental trauma out on his wonderful wife. He wants to be better. He used to have funny stories to tell her.

He should start being a better husband by not walking in on his wife when she's in the bathroom. "I'll let you pee and poop without this story of pee and poop."

"You can stay," she says. "I think I'm pregnant again."

"Really?" That sounded really high to him. "Did that sound really high to you?"

"Yup," she says. "Don't worry, I've been talking pretty high, too. I can't believe you knocked me up the very first time."

He exhales and looks at the sink. "Hey, you got a test. You already peed on that?"

"Yup." she says. "Is Prairie asleep?"

"Yup," he says. "How do you know it was the first time? We've done it since then. We've had date nights." His therapist told him to. It's been sandwiched between maybe possibly talking to his mother and what getting back to work will mean for him. Sometimes his shrink tells him to bring Kensi so they can work on those important issues which feels like being dissected by two three years old, except they're only working on his brain. His shrink often comments on Marty's negative metaphors about therapy.

She washes her hands. "Timing wise, it had to be that time."

"Is it a bad thing if you are?" He thinks it would be kind of great. But he's not ready to go back to work. He hasn't decided if he wants to go back to work. But he has to get some sort of job at some point because they can't keep this condo if they don't have more money. Which does not argue for a second pregnancy. Second beautiful baby like Prairie.

"No," she says. "I think we can make it work. Right? We wanted more kids."

"We totally do," he says. "We want more kids. And clearly my sperm wants to be with your eggs."

"Yes, it seems like we're very very compatible," she says. She holds up the stick. "Pregnant."

He can't help himself from smiling. "Yay?"

She nods. "Yay."

"Yay," he says, kissing her. "I love sex without condoms. I love that we can do that now." He hugs her close. She clings to his chest. "Good things we're really great at parenting, right?"

She sniffles into his tee shirt. "Yup."

xx

"So it's totally good news," Kensi says. She really believes that. Everything was difficult and awful when she was pregnant with Prairie and now it's a hundred times better.

"I'm thrilled," Dolly says. "You look pretty thrilled."

"I am, actually," Kensi says.

"What are you doing for work," Dolly says.

"Strangely enough, Hetty had already worked out a plan for this. I'm moving to training, there's a new agent already on the way. I'm only 7 weeks along and she already has a new agent lined up. It's weird," Kensi says. "I'm sorry Marty isn't ready to talk to you yet."

"It's okay," Dolly says. She gives up too easily, Kensi thinks. "You forgave your mother eventually."

"I didn't really forgive her."

"She told me as soon as you saw her, you were ready to start over again. Even though, after everything.." Dolly smiles.

"Wow, you two talk a lot, huh?" Kensi rubs her hands on her jeans. "Okay, see, I knew. My mom never says, because she doesn't like to admit it - my dad's family weren't the nicest people. They were always nice to me because I was family. But as soon as my mom left, they, they and my dad, they started. Um, they threatened her with all this stuff legally. So even when my father died, they set up all these barriers, and lied to her. When they died, I saw all the documents and realized they'd lied to me. But I was too ashamed, I shoved it all back down and pretending I didn't know. I didn't want to think that about my father. He loved me, he was a good man. He just wasn't a good man in every single thing he did." Kensi shrugs. "Oh, fuck, I am definitely pregnant. This is total first trimester emotional vomit."

"It's okay," Dolly says. She pats Kensi's hand. She even leans over and hugs her.

"I don't know why Marty's mad at you," Kensi says.

"I get it," Dolly says. "I'm a failure at being there for him." She looks pained but then she shrugs.

"I'll bring Prairie next time," Kensi says.

She drives around aimlessly before she goes home. It's nice to have a few minutes without dog and baby and husband.

She gets home to an empty condo. For a split second she thinks of Hartley, who is still out there, who hasn't really been heard from in three months.

She sees the note on the dry erase board next: "me and baby and monty hanging out!" Marty's handwriting is horrible these days.

She sits on the couch and turns on the tv. She immediately falls asleep.

She wakes up to Prairie's baby laughter. Marty has her on her tummy, but she's having fun for once, rocking and crawling a little and reaching for Monty's paws or Marty's hand. She's the sweetest, prettiest baby in the whole world. "I love you," Kensi says.

Monty barks, happy barking. "Monty says thanks, he loves you, too," Marty says. "I thought you were speaking to Prairie, of course."

"It was the collective you," she says.

xx

"So I hear you're doing this training stuff instead of out in the field," Marty says. He puts on his ear protectors and stands at position in the firing range.

Kensi rolls her eyes. She already has her ear protectors on. "This is fun," she says. She hands him a sig. "I'm having so many flashbacks to working with you."

"How much you wanted me?"

"How much you irritated me," she says. She's smiling, so he doesn't believe her. She stands behind him and arranges his stance correctly. "We are going to be here all day, buddy."

"Can you stay that close behind me? That's super hot," Marty says.

It does take all day. It takes a week for him to get back to NCIS acceptable levels. It's taken a lot of work to get both hands back to even attempting this. It takes 10 days to get him to Kensi acceptable levels on four different guns.

"Next is hand to hand," she says. "Are you really doing that with Sam?"

"I want to be good," he says. "Do you think someone else is gonna make me that good?"

Kensi says, "Well, sure, but then you come home complaining and whining. And bruised." She kisses his cheek. "I would, you look great. You're really back in shape."

"Thank you," he says. He feels like he's putting up a great facade. Everything used to be easier, which is a stupid thing to even think. He liked getting in shape, his body always did what he wanted. He hasn't even gone surfing yet. It's a carrot dangling out in front of him for when he gets back to work.

"I know you're working really hard," Kensi says. "Wanna go to daycare and trade off snuggling our baby?"

"You know it," he says.

He loves Prairie, from her fat toes to her pretty hair in curls. She loves him back, he is pretty sure. She falls asleep in his arms and doesn't cry horribly when he's left alone with her or Kensi just leaves the room. He dresses her in girly clothes and little surf tees. He has 400 pictures of her on his new phone. She and Kensi are the strongest parts of his heart. Wow, and the rest of him is apparently pure cheese.

He has two-a-days with Sam. In between, he's conditioning and taking every ridiculous alternative therapeutic class/sessions he can find. He's already back to Reiki twice a week and massage (thai, swedish) three times a week. Sam calls them ridiculous, not him.

"Aerial yoga," Sam says. "What is that?" Today is basic hand to hand. They come at each other, no rules. Sam wins, but Marty makes him work for it.

"It's yoga done with silks suspended from the ceiling. We float in a hammock of relaxation. Sometimes my teacher comes by and gives us a little lavender oil on our foreheads." Marty tries coming in low and hard on the right to get Sam on the ground and ends up flipped on his back.

"Lavender oil," Sam says. He reaches down and helps Marty up. "I don't have any of that."

"That is what's missing from our manly trainings," Marty says. "One time, we had a teacher who read us poetry instead of the lavender oil. You could do that."

"Yeah, tomorrow we're going to do this and every time you end up on your back, I'll recite some Gwendolyn Brooks. And if you ask who Gwendolyn Brooks is, I will put you on the floor now."

"Your daughter had to do a report on her," Marty says.

Sam nods. Marty shifts his weight to the left and goes low and hard on the right again. This time he pushes Sam off his feet before he ends up flipped on his back.

The next day, in their second round of sparring, Sam says, "You don't have to do this." He makes an obvious punch that Marty easily evades. He's ready for the less obvious kick which he also avoids.

"I thought I had to do this for, you know, being an agent." They scuffle and make contact and break apart.

"You sure you still want to be an agent?"

Marty tries a real punch and then comes in low when Sam dodges. He gets in a real hit before Sam pushes him back. "Don't you think I'm good enough for NCIS?"

"You were always good enough for NCIS. Maybe I didn't always see that," Sam says. "But it's true." He punches Marty right in the ribs which is really incredibly painful. Marty still manages to come back around and knee Sam in the gut. They both fall back. "See," Sam says. He's actually holding his stomach like Marty hurt him.

"So I'm good enough," Marty says. "Why are you questioning if I want to do it?"

"Being good doesn't mean you want to," Sam says. "You got to want this, what we do. And you, you used to always want it."

They finally go back to fighting. Marty is feeling pretty aggressive, even with the painful rib, so neither of them are doing much talking. It isn't until they're both off the mat, icing and metaphorically licking their wounds, that Sam starts talking again.

"I'm noting you haven't said you do want this."

"Fine," Marty says. He puts an icepack on his ribs. "I want this."

"Yeah, that sounded sincere."

Marty lays back on the mat. "What do you want from me? I can do a whole cheer routine telling you how much I want to be in NCIS but it's gonna need to wait until maybe tomorrow. Whenever I can sit up."

Sam says, "You went through hell for over a year. If you want to stay home with your baby, that's good. If you don't want to gear up every day to make yourself a target, that's good, too. Because you're going to be here, and I like to stay alive, and I want you to want this so you will be your best. So that's why I'm asking if you really want this or you're doing it because you think you have to or you can't think of anything else to do."

"I want to keep you alive, Sam, I promise," Marty says.

At home, Kensi is in front of their full length mirror with her pants off and her underwear pulled low. "Am I already showing? I'm only 14 weeks. You know how big the baby is now? The size of a bean."

"You show earlier with your second," he says. "I read that."

She wrinkles her adorable nose in dislike. "I hate this stage. I hate the am I fat or am I pregnant stage."

"You're hot whichever," he says. He means it. "I am very interested in having sex with you right now."

"Tomorrow morning?" She walks past him to get on the bed where Prairie is sleeping fitfully. "Sorry, I am seriously exhausted."

"I'm happy to cuddle," he says.

He's adjusting his meds down again to getting off them as much as he can before he goes back to work. His shrink says he may never be completely off some of them, which is the kind of thing that makes him anxious so it's good he'll never be off his anti-anxiety medication. He wakes up with a gasp and doesn't remember anything, he just feels like something bad is coming and he can't do anything to stop it. He's rolled away from Prairie and Kensi. Prairie is awake, her eyes open, looking at him. He moves closer and plays with her hair until she falls back to sleep.

Monty jumps up and settles in against his back. Marty falls asleep watching his daughter breathe.

In the morning, Kensi is dragging herself out of bed. She says, "Sorry. Later?"

"I'm good," Marty says. "I never have fun if you don't."

"God, you're like a dream man," Kensi says. "Fuck," she says, dabbing at her eyes. "These fucking hormones."

Prairie points and laughs.

"Baby thinks you're funny, Kens."

"I am not funny," she says. "You tell me that all the time."

"Prairie loves her mommy, she even thinks your jokes are funny."

Kensi kisses him goodbye and goes off to work. He has another thirty minutes to walk Monty and then he drops Prairie off at the Mission daycare and goes to get beaten up by Sam.

Today he has a massage and reiki. His mind drifts during both, he thinks about things he doesn't want to think about. He tries to direct his thoughts back or box them up or whatever he was last told to do. Maybe he'd be good if he just had Monty at his back and Prairie in his arms.


	7. Chapter 7

_In my mind I am in your arms_

Kensi decides they should have an anniversary party. "If you subtract the time you were gone, it's been a year. We can date from there, just for us. But I think a party would be fun."

He thinks, really? He says, "You want to plan it and have people over?"

"You're giving me a look," she says. She smiles. "This is not me being hormonal. It will be fun. It will be nice for us to hang out with our family and friends before you go back to work."

"You want to invite my mother," he says. "Okay, it's fine."

"Are you sure?"

He thinks about saying no but Praire is being adorable and he just wants to stay happy. So he nods.

The party turns out okay. His mother stays away from him, he doesn't make a fuss, it's all good. He spends most of his time with Callen and Prairie. Callen is chatty which is frightening. It can't be alcohol because they aren't serving any. He does see Hetty with a flask that looks like it's made of carved ivory. But Callen, of all people in the world, goes on and on about anything.

"This is what you're like when you're getting laid regularly?"

Callen actually laughs. He says, "I guess so. I try not to let it out."

"It's scary, G. I'm scared."

Prairie giggles. She reaches for Callen and Callen takes her, hugging her to his chest. "Now I'm more scared," Marty says.

After everyone leaves, Marty cleans while Kensi puts Prairie to bed. Monty follows him around like he's watching for something bad to happen. "I'm good, buddy," Marty says. "Thanks, though."

He gets into bed and Monty jumps up to settle in beside him. Kensi says very quietly, "Tonight was good, right?"

"Yup," he says. "But you just want to talk about my mom again."

She laughs quietly. "I do want to. But we don't have to."

"I'm just. Kensi, I know the research and the facts and it's wrong to blame the victim and I'm not. I know she's not to blame and I'm not to blame. I know there are so many reasons she ended up in a relationship like she had with my father, and all of that. I was there and everything. You know, she got as far as a shelter twice before she came back. Both times, she left me with him. And I could sit with that and be okay because she was dead. She was dead and she hadn't abandoned me. But she was alive and she did abandon me. Again. You see?"

He sighs and Monty tries to lick his neck. It's gross and comforting. Also, his own dog is too lazy to sit up and lick his face, so he settles for whatever he can reach.

He says, "I don't want to sit down and work it out. I've got enough shit in my life."

She laughs again. "You better not mean me or her, mister."

"Never ever," he says. "I do mean Monty."

She laughs again, and Prairie whimpers. They're both as silent as possible until she settles back to sleep. Then Kensi says, "You know, I was telling your mom this story and I'm going to tell you now. My dad was a great guy. Great father, great Marine. Good person. But not such a great husband. He never cheated, but. In the Blye family, you're in or you're out. I told you my uncle died because of a drunk driver. He was going to pick up his girlfriend, and my grandparents blamed her to the end. She wasn't one of us, so it was her fault. I know that makes no sense, but that is the way they thought."

She pauses. He can see the hesitation in her face. "When I ran away from my mom, she started calling the cops, my dad, everyone as soon as she realized I was gone. She probably didn't mention that. Because the cops were the ones who told her I was home and to stop making a fuss. She had to call my dad to talk to me, he didn't, he didn't tell her for half a day. It wasn't her business at that point. And my grandparents, and my dad, for the divorce, they made up shit, they filed some insane stuff. But my mom didn't have money, she didn't have me, she did her best, but she just got worn down. She tried again when my dad died. But my grandparents had official custody and they just fought her off. They didn't even tell her I had run away. By the time I came home, they had worn her down again. She assumed I hated her, I had been brainwashed, you know? And I was, sort of. After my grandparents died, I found all the documents and papers. It was pretty clear to me but I didn't want to admit it. I just put it aside in my head. When I saw her again, I just thought, I had just found out that my father had lied to me and I knew. She had tried. I just, I don't know. I do actually understand what it's like when your parent isn't who you thought they were? Also, sometimes I feel guilty talking about my dad as so great when he did do some wrong things. Even if he thought they were right."

He kisses her, quietly. "Thank you," he says. "But the only lies here were my mom not being dead and no one telling me about my close blood connection to Joseph Stalin."

"You're not related to Stalin."

"I was exaggerating," he says. "You know humor and hyperbole are my defense mechanisms."

"Whatever," she says. "See if I bare my soul to you again." She nearly laughs.

"Come on, how many secrets do you have left?"

"Like I'm gonna tell you," she says. "Be quiet and don't wake the baby."

"But -"

"Sssh," she says.

"But I love you," he says quietly.

"I love you," she says. "Sssssh."

xx

Next up is a week in San Diego taking tests to be an agent. Kensi will be doing a training for a select group of NCIS agents so they can make it a family trip. "I'm not so thrilled with the daycare here," Kensi says. "We have to, but I really prefer the one at the mission."

"This one isn't staffed by frightening older women who can also break both your arms with a pencil?"

"That, too, but mostly the woman I talked to actually asked me why I was still breastfeeding a 16 month old." Kensi has her own frightening stern look on her face. She probably wouldn't even need a pencil, she'd do it with a crayon.

"Insufficiently supportive of breastfeeding?"

"Yeah," Kensi says, with a huff. "It's irritating and I could go on about it, but I know you agree with me, so I won't. You need to get to your testing."

He has psych evals in the morning, followed by psych testing in the afternoon the first two days. "It's like they're really concerned about my mental state. I think they want to make sure I won't go all Trotsky on them," he says to Prairie. She laughs at him but that is probably because he is bouncing her on his knee.

"How would you go 'all Trotsky' on them?" Kensi is cranky. Her pants don't fit, her maternity pants are too big and she's wearing skirts that she hates. "Are you going to start an opposition view of Marxism or get assassinated in Mexico?" She flinches. "Okay, no to the last one."

"That's okay. We both know I was just making another one of my guess who's the grandson of not very good KGB agents joke. Trotsky got tossed from the party, that's what I was trying to imply."

Kensi says, "You don't know they weren't very good."

Marty says, "Their organization doesn't technically exist anymore, I am about to work for NCIS."

"I don't think they're responsible for the entire fall of the Soviet Union," she says. "I don't even know why I'm arguing with you."

"Want a baby? She cheers me right up." He holds Prairie up and pretends to fly her like an airplane to the couch seat next to Kensi. Prairie rocks with laughter.

Kensi pull her shirt open and Prairie goes right for the boob.

Then it's 3 days of physical conditioning tests before he heads to the shooting range. He gets beat up, he shoots targets, he does the walk through fake places and shoots at the right cardboard figures. He's good, he passes everything. These aren't the tests they put the usual applicants through, he has very own tests. He's special that way.

They're driving home to LA with Prairie napping in her car seat when Kensi's phone makes loud buzzing sounds. "Sorry," she says, "that's my ringtone for Eric, you know, emergencies."

Prairie whimpers. Kensi listens to Eric, says, "Everyone okay? We good?" She nods and he sees her free hand unclench. "Got it," she says. "See you Monday."

"Hartley's in custody," Kensi says. "He killed two agents guarding your mother and she's a little battered, but it's all over now."

He feels a chill from his neck down to his foot against the pedal. So this is the end, a phone call on a highway, baby in the back. All the bad guys are locked away or dead and he didn't do any of the killing or apprehending. All he did was survive. His shrink would tell him that surviving was a great accomplishment. He doesn't need vengeance for the aches in his joints or the scars in his mouth and on his palms.

He gets mad when he thinks about those first months of Prairie's life, her first breath and her first poop. He missed Kensi getting big the first time and seeing the stretch marks form on her hips. Or the way they faded to barely visible, for which she seems to thank God nightly.

He hurts everywhere suddenly and he says, "Let's switch drivers at the next Starbucks."

"Okay," she says. She's looking out the window, watching the billboards fly by. She says, "I want to go to the hospital to see your mom."

"I'll go, too," he says. He guesses he will. He didn't plan to say that but he means it.

She is looking at him now. "Okay."

"Okay," he says.

His mother isn't in too bad shape. She'll be home in a day or two. He's pretty sure she was hurt worse when he was a kid than what Hartley did. She smiles wide when she sees him come in, like it's his high school graduation all over again. "Hey," he says.

"Hi," she says.

"This is awkward," he says.

She nods. She's still grinning. It's humbling how easy it is to make her happy. It makes his whole day when Prairie clings to his shirt like she loves him. He'll probably look like a grinning idiot when Prairie can talk and says anything even vaguely nice to him.

"You have every right -"

"I do," he says. "I know, I get to be angry and you get to be angry, and I can have my feelings and not blame the victim, which in this case is both of us and I've had all the therapy, Mom." He crosses his arms in front of his chest. "I feel like I am who I am despite Dad, but I don't think that way about you."

"Really?" He gets another huge smile. "That's so sweet."

"You gotta raise your standards," he says, sitting down next to her bed.

xx

His last hoop to jump through is DC. He gets three days of compressed how to enforce the NCIS rules and spends the next two weeks assigned to Gibbs's team. "And the Director's office is right there?"

"Yup," Kensi says. "Don't worry, he's mostly nice."

"To you. People are always nice to you. You're beautiful and intelligent and you have great hair."

"That's the pregnancy," Kensi says. "Also, people like you. Once they get to know you. After a couple of months." She grins at him. "Oh, right, you only have two weeks."

Kensi is teaching a class and taking a class at Quantico. Marty says, "How much reach does Hetty have?"

"A lot," she says.

"It's nice to have support," Marty says. "A little creepy, though."

"A little," she says.

They fly to DC. Kensi tells him how easy it was with Prairie on their trip out. Now she's older and she's basically a nightmare. For five hours they are the people everyone tries to avoid on the plane. Naturally, Prairie has cried herself out by the time they land so she's sleeping as everyone glares at them as they get off. "We deserve it," Kensi says.

"Basically," he says.

Four days later, he's officially a probationary special agent. He reports to the Navy Yard in his slacks and blazer. "You're allowed to personalize your desk a little," McGee says. Kensi had introduced him to everyone except Gibbs who hasn't arrived yet and then went off to hang with Abby.

He takes his framed picture of Kensi, Prairie and Monty out of his bag and puts it next to the computer. That's all he needs. It's just two weeks. He has to make it through two weeks of being a Navy cop to go back to his old job. It's gonna be a party.

Gibbs spends two minutes doing his best blue steel at Marty's hair and beard. Then he says, "If you were here longer than two weeks, we'd be talking about that."

Marty nods.

He goes downstairs to find his wife. Kensi is laughing in the forensics lab with Abby. He's pretty sure no one else would match that description. Abby squeals as he walks in and runs over to hug him. She has a very strong hug. "I'm so glad you're alive," she says.

"Me, too," he says.

The first week feels thirty days long. It's not like Marty doesn't remember what it's like to be a cop, and being a Navy cop isn't really that different, but he feels like he is definitely not suited for his supervisor to be a taciturn withholding older man. His father liked to crack bad jokes, if Marty tries to remember, but something about Gibbs makes him feel like he's 10 years old and hiding in his room again. He spends half the day talking himself out of that feeling, since Gibbs is nothing like his dad and a profoundly decent person. But a day spent telling yourself to relax, to pull down your shoulders, is a really long fucking day.

He also really misses wearing jeans and a tee shirt to work.

He still goes home to his long-term stay hotel suite and there's Prairie and Kensi. Or Kensi drops off Prairie with him on her way to a girls' night with Ziva and Abby. Which happens three times in the first week.

He also misses Monty.

Gibbs's team isn't on call for the weekend so he gets to wear jeans and take Prairie everywhere. Kensi is their guide on the metro. "Born in California, I don't understand subways."

"LA has a subway," Kensi says.

"Have you ever been on it?"

"Once," she says. "For a case." She glares at him. "Fine. Touche."

Prairie says, "Ma, Da, ghugh!"

Kensi says, "I agree."

"We don't want to pretend ghugh is a new word?" Marty has Prairie on his lap. He squeezes her close and kisses the hair on top of her head. Prairie has five words: Ma, Da, Mon (Monty), Wa (water or boob) and Good.

"Well, it wasn't good, because she says that clearly. Say 'good,' Prairie."

Prairie stares at Kensi and presses her lips together. Marty laughs. "I am not your puppet, Mommy!"

Kensi laughs. Two stops later she winces and leans against Marty's shoulder. Marty says, "Pregnant yuck?"

She nods.

Prairie pats Kensi's leg over and over again. Then she says, "Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma."

Kensi says, "Yeah?"

"Mama, good." Prairie smiles.

"You're the best," Kensi says. She pulls Prairie onto her lap and hugs her tight.

They move Prairie to the stroller they brought with them as they get out and explore the Mall. Prairie falls asleep halfway through the Aerospace Museum, and Kensi argues they should wake her up. "Look at this," she says, eyes wide. "She shouldn't miss it."

"She's 17 months old," Marty says. "She is not going to remember it."

"It's just so cool," Kensi says.

He hates it when the weekend is over. This feels like a job and a job he's good at it but maybe doesn't even particularly like anymore. It will be different in LA, at OSP. He still likes undercover, he is sure of that. He can do this. As long as he gets weekends.

He gets a call at 4:30 am Monday morning which wakes him up and Prairie, so Kensi is up as well. McGee gives him the address. "Shots fired, might be a hostage situation. We're meeting a block away so you can get your vest." He hangs up.

"Fuck it," Marty says. "Today I wear jeans."

Kensi says, "That'll show 'em." She's trying to convince Prairie to go back to sleep.

He takes a very fast shower, puts on his jeans and a button-down which seems like a good enough compromise, kisses Prairie and Kensi goodbye and heads out.

He's not the last to arrive since he beats Ziva by two minutes which is good. They vest up, they move towards the house. It's military housing which is why they've been called out, someone in there is Navy. "No shots in the last ten minutes," DiNozzo says.

After half an hour, no one answers their phone calls and Gibbs swears he hears someone inside asking for help. They enter the house.

Marty follows Gibbs. They haven't found anyone or heard anyone after the entryway, first corridor. In the kitchen, there's a gurgle and harsh breathing. A woman, white, thirties, curled on the floor, bleeding from two bullets, Marty would guess. He does a cursory examination and says, "All defensive wounds, not the shooter." Gibbs nods and moves on. Marty calls the paramedics in and tries to find a place to apply pressure or whatever he can do to help. They're big ugly bullet holes. He can see a healing black eye on her face and the kind of bruise you get when someone twists your arm. As if he didn't already hate this case enough.

The paramedics come in and under that noise, he is sure he hears a sniffle. He looks around for where someone small might hide. The paramedics start to get the woman onto the gurney and he definitely hears something to the right. He moves over towards the sound and finds a space under the stairs. There's a child in pink pajamas, so therefore he thinks, a girl, hiding there. He squats down and says, "Hey. Do you want to come out?"

The girl tries to look around him to see the woman. "Are they helping her?"

"Yup," he says. "If you want to come out, I'm a cop. I'll take you outside."

She nods and wiggles out of the space. She has a few fading bruises. "Okay," he says.

He guides her without touching her to outside. He radios Gibbs and gives a quick and quiet description of what he knows so far. Outside the paramedics do a quick check of the girl and then leave them alone. She says, "Mommy will be okay?"

"The paramedics took her to get better," he says. "She's good at keeping you safe, right?"

The girl nods. He says, "So what's your name?"

"Alexis," she mumbles.

"So people call you Al? You know the song right, 'you can call me al?'" He sings it, badly.

"No one calls me Al," she says, but she smiles.

"I'm gonna. I'm Marty," he says.

"I'll call you Mar, then," she says. He laughs.

"You are funny. I have a baby girl, I hope she's funny like you when she's your age." He takes out his phone and shows her a picture of Prairie and Monty. He tells a story about Monty and Prairie. He says, "Tell me about your house. Who lives there? You, and your mom."

"And Dad," she says quietly.

He nods. He knows that way of saying the name. It's exactly as bad as he thought. "What about brothers, sisters? I'm just checking. My wife is pregnant, so my daughter is going to be a big sister. But my wife and I are only kids, so we have no idea. Are you a big sister?"

"No," she says. "You talk a lot. I have a big sister and a big brother."

"I do talk a lot," he says. "My daughter doesn't mind."

"She's a baby," Al says.

"You're funny again," he says. She tells him how old her siblings are. He says, "I'm just gonna step over here. You stay funny, I'll be right back." He radios Gibbs what he knows.

Gibbs says, "We found the sister. She's been shot. She's dead." His voice sounds like he's been gargling rough glass. "Brother and father aren't here."

"I'll see if the girl knows where they might be."

He asks her where her dad works. She shrugs. He says, "Have you ever been there?"

"Once," she says. She's looking at the ground.

"Do you remember anything about it?"

"Yes," she says. She looks at him and smirks. Then her smile crumples and she's looking at her feet again.

He says, "I know we just met, but can I give you hug? It's okay if you say no, I know I keep calling you Al -" she hugs him before he goes on too long. He pats her back and says, "Alex, I'm sorry this is your day."

She pulls back and rubs at her eyes. She gives him details, enough for him to relay to Gibbs. Then he and Al talk about milk vs soy milk, her favorite basketball team (the Wizards, of course) and Marty's (the Clippers). He maneuvers Alex to face away from the house as Ducky and Palmer take out the body of her sister. He watches, though.

Everyone is being very careful around Gibbs. He assumes Gibbs's late daughter was the same age as the sister or close enough.

Gibbs talks to a woman who's just arrived. Then he brings the woman over to them. She says, "Alexis?"

"Social services," Marty says.

The woman smiles. She seems competent. He says, "I call her Al."

Alexis tries to kick him, he dodges. She walks over to the social worker and doesn't even wave goodbye. Gibbs says, "We're heading back to the Navy Yard."

They find the dad before he kills the son, but not before he kills himself and two of his coworkers at the mess.

Kensi is waiting when he gets back from that crime scene. She's at his desk with food and Prairie in her pinkest and ruffliest dress. "Kens, she looks a little ridiculous like that. We get it, she's a girl."

"It's what she wanted to wear, I am not kidding." Kensi leans forward and kisses him. "I held things up and she said no a lot."

"Isn't no a new word?" He sits down at his desk.

"I'm not counting it," she says, frowning. "Anyway, I brought you very late lunch."

"Thanks, but -"

"Take it, Deeks," Gibbs says as he walks in. "Did good today."

Kensi and Ziva have identical expressions of shock. Marty says, "Thank you. Or did you mean my beautiful and intelligent wife?"

Gibbs says, "Your wife is a good agent. You did good today. See the difference?"

"Yes," Marty says. He takes a bite of his wife-brought burrito.

Kensi says, "Thank you, Gibbs."

Friday finally comes, and he sits down at his desk for what is hopefully and thankfully his last day at the Navy Yard. He's sure he can do this. It's not as alluring as staying home all day with his soon-to-be two babies and making sure they spend every moment of every day bathing in love and affection, surrounded by metaphorical unicorns and honey bears, but they have bills to pay. Which is funny, because he thinks Kensi finds being an agent and a mom equally awesome. For him, fatherhood has the edge. A very large edge, lately.

He can do this, he can do this. He fiddles with his picture on his desk.

Gibbs comes in and says, "Did you go to the hospital last night?"

"More like early evening but," he pauses. "Yes. I was just checking up on Al."

"You took that dog I made for Prairie."

"Yes. Sorry," he says.

"You coulda just asked," Gibbs says. He even smiles.

"Actually, Alexis said she prefers cats. I told her I could take it back but she decided to hold onto it." Marty turns on his computer and starts reviewing his work email. So many things to wrap up, so little time or desire.

"You still want to be an agent," Gibbs says firmly.

"Sure," Marty says. He's getting creeped out by having this almost bantery discussion with Gibbs. That's more of a DiNozzo thing.

"I mean it," Gibbs says.

"I agree," Marty says. He does agree. Damn Gibbs and his ninja mind tricks and making things crystallize and be clear. "I do agree."

"Great, then let's call this done. Pick up your wife and kid." Gibbs slaps down another wooden dog pull toy on his desk. "I mean it. Go home."

"I have things -"

"Leave it for DiNozzo."

"My pleasure," Marty says.

xx

Kensi is at the waddling stage of this pregnancy. Her first two pregnancies, it took much longer to get to waddling but this time, it's five and a half months along. She told Marty this was going to be the last. He made his sad face and said, "You don't want five kids?"

She just glared at him. He said, "This is the last, okay. Three is good. Three kids. I'm okay with it."

Which was before they found out it was twins. Identical boy twins. She feels like she can handle boys. She knows what to do with boys. She's pretty sure.

Since she is waddling, she can only carry the dogs' leashes. Marty has both girls and her chair and the baby bags. Marty says, "TIme for down, Etta."

They named her Scarlet Lange Deeks, but Prairie said "Etta" when they brought the baby home, so Etta she is. Etta wobbles in the sand, but stays standing up. She walks over to Kensi and attaches herself to Kensi's fat swollen calf.

Marty sets up her chair and helps her lower her whale body into it. This is her spot for their Sunday trip to the beach. In January. All this time and Marty is still making up for two and a half years of not surfing. She smiles at him and he grins right back at her.

He puts the bags next to her where she can get them easily. He picks up Etta and spins her around while she shrieks. Marty says Etta has Kensi's looks and his personality, while Prairie is basically Marty's female clone with Kensi's personality. He says the way Prairie charges into everything and wants to do everything is very Kensi. Etta's quiet and likes to just be part of things, not in charge or doing anything. Kensi does not see how that's anything like Marty. But she knows he thinks it is. Maybe Etta is like who Marty thinks he would have been if he hadn't had his father.

She shakes her head to clear her brain. Marty puts Etta back down and she runs as best she can to Kensi, back to her fat calf. Prairie is in a pink ruffled swimsuit already begging to go in the water with Marty. It's weird. Prairie is weird. She will only wear pink, and if it has sparkles, it's the best pink ever. She also loves trucks and trains and rockets. It is not easy to find pink outfits with trucks or trains or rockets on them.

Puppy Wayne butts against Kensi's other calf. Monty is old now, but he stays by Marty and Prairie. One of Marty's old cop buddies brought by a runt of the litter, begging Marty to take him. Kensi was won over as soon as the puppy went to her, and not Marty. She likes having her own dog. They let Prairie name the dog, and she insisted on Puppy.

"And when he's not a puppy? Maybe something else," Kensi said.

"Maybe a second name," Marty said. "Like George. Puppy George."

"Wayne," Prairie said. "Puppy Wayne."

Next pet they get, Kensi gets to name it.

Marty lets Prairie splash in the super shallows but then he carries her back to Kensi. She pouts but Kensi gets out a book and Monty perks up so Prairie sits down in the sand. Kensi will never get the sand out of those ruffles.

Marty gets his surfboard and starts surfing. For an hour, Kensi reads to the girls, lets them play on her tablet, and generally keeps Prairie from running into the water.

Marty ambles up and sits down next to Monty. He pets his dog and says, "Do you think we look alike?"

"No," Prairie says.

"Yes," Kensi says. "You still have the same haircut."

"Ha, ha." He squints over her shoulder. "Is that the grandmothers?"

Kensi smiles. "Yes, and help me up."

He is immediately obedient, just like he promised when they got married. By the time she's standing up, Kensi's mom and Dolly are there. Kensi says, "Happy birthday, Sweetie." She kisses his cheek.

"Go with Grandmas," Marty says. "Is what the kids are doing. And the dogs. And my birthday is tomorrow."

"Tomorrow you're at work. Today we have our moms are going home with our kids and we have, like, 5 hours to celebrate."

He kisses her. "Thank you," he says. "Can we get a hotel room and make out?"

She laughs. "Really?" She scratches her large stomach. "You really wanna? I do want to, but."

"You are always hot to me," he says. She thinks he's telling the truth.

She takes his hand and they walk to the minivan.


End file.
